Comment by 20after4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 20after4 | Hacker News Reader

I worked at deviantArt from 2009 to 2013. It was my dream job. At the time deviantArt made money a few ways.

In no particular order, because I don't know which were profitable or which represented a larger portion of revenue:

- Subscriptions (users could pay for a few extra features and to disable ads on the site) - DeviantArt branded merch. - Prints and products with users' art printed on them - Sponsored Contests. These promoted movies or other media properties, or software of interest to artists. Often the prizes included Wacom tablets and Adobe Photoshop licenses.

During my time there a significant problem we were dealing with was due to deviantArt's stance on adult content. Anything was allowed as long as it wasn't outright pornography. In practice that meant that nudes were allowed but sexual acts were not. This had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks and were forced to deal with seedier outfits that often (e.g. constantly) included malware in the display ads, exposing users to all sorts of nasty stuff. One of my projects was to detect and/or prevent the malware ads which proved challenging and at least given the amount of resources devoted to it, it was not very fruitful.

It really is sad for me to see what deviantArt has devolved into. Once the original founders sold out a few years ago I really didn't hold out much hope for the site's future.

> This had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks

Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement.

It is a shame that the Internet that we have created depends pretty much solely on that form of revenue.

It's not just ads, it's a lot of B2B services that ban you if you don't have a strict rule on sexual content (or even nudity).

Unless it's a conservative religious service, why would they care? Money is money, and porn isn't a crime.

In some places it is.

How silly.

> Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement.

The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do not want their businesses to be associated with adult material, so they insist that advertisers do not place ads on adult-content-friendly websites to reduce the risk of that association happening due to ads adjacent to adult content.

I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most businesses (or many/most businesses that are highly valuable to advertisers) materially concerned enough about association-with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they would switch advertisers over it? Or are advertisers manufacturing family-friendly ad placement as a competitive selling point that their customers never really asked for?

I'm also curious about the next level down the stack, as it were: if a significant subset of businesses who hire advertisers are concerned about adult-content-association-via-nearby-placement, why is that? Is it merely disgust/discomfort on the part of business leadership and prevailing culture? Or does data indicate that there's a material risk to enough businesses' bottom lines that it's fiscally prudent to avoid that association?

(Reasoning from first principles without data, so probably wrong) I'm skeptical about the validity of both claims. Adult content is really popular across many demographics whose behavior is otherwise quite different. Given that broad base of popularity, is it really that risky for a business to have its brand appear in an ad next to pornography compared to, say, appearing on a politically extreme news site, or next to algorithmically-prioritized ragebait content on social media? Unlike adult content, I feel like the associations formed by seeing a company mentioned next to something anger inducing are more likely to be negative than the associations formed by seeing it next to adult content that the viewer presumably sought out. In both cases, the chance of behaviorally-significant associations being formed at all seems quite low, so I'd imagine that effects here (if there are any) would only be visible in the very very large.

People who hate nudity will organise protests and get news coverage, giving more voice to a minority. Same with anything, the ones massively for/against something will spend money time/money on complaining that the passive majority. See gun control in US for an example

https://hbr.org/2024/03/lessons-from-the-bud-light-boycott-o...

Advertisers don’t have to believe the content is actually objectionable to fear reprisal. Outrage machine types on all sides will make an issue out of anything they can use to score points for themselves.

The marginal value of putting a Johnson & Johnson ad (say) in front of some furries is nothing compared to dread of the headline “J&J wants your children to be furries!”

> putting a Johnson & Johnson ad (say) in front of some furries

A very real possibility when advertising on DeviantArt. But a no-adult-content policy would have (probably) satisfied adsense terms but would not have eliminated (most) of the furrie content on DeviantArt.

This.

The advertisers care about getting bad press and having to do the rounds in the "news cycle".

By now everyone knows that advertisers don't choose which posts, tweets, images, etc. their ads are shown next to, but that still won't stop the CNNs of the world from writing a "<Brand> advertises next to Nazi content on <Platform>!" article.

While many media outfits are very good at manufacturing outrage, I’m not sure whether a big ad farm putting (say) Walmart ads on PornHub would materially move the needle on bad-press-risk.

Like, if a media outlet or politico wants to make hay about Walmart being advertised next to nazis, I’m sure that’s trivially easy to find today (and you only need to find one instance of that adjacency to make hay for a news cycle).

So why isn’t this already an issue in the status quo? Why aren’t brands being pressured into changing their ad placement habits right and left?

Sure, some businesses are being called out for things they explicitly endorse (e.g. Budweiser pride ads), but that’s not the same thing as running an ordinary ad in a questionable place.

Perhaps advertisers have written off adult content sites as places where there isn’t enough money to be made to risk it? If so, I’m curious what consumer behavioral data backs up that conclusion.

>So why isn’t this already an issue in the status quo?

Didn’t this just happen to Xhitter? Their ad revenue has dropped like a brick.

> The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do not want their businesses to be associated with adult material

That's the biggest joke in the world, the largest diffusers of explicit content are by far the advertisers which they use to sell anything, from cars to shampoo

The advertising industry is the very last industry which can claim a moral high ground on anything.

Reread what you quoted. The advertising industry isn't claiming the moral high ground on anything, they claim their client are. And their clients will tell you, no, it's the customers who will throw a fit at the slightest hint of nipple.

It's buck-passing all the way down.

> the largest diffusers of explicit content are by far the advertisers which they use to sell anything, from cars to shampoo

Relevant Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4NyMJHWVHw

They lie outright. The other day I saw an ad of a body lotion that “modifies your skin DNA”, according to the ad.

It ultimately all happens due to news media. While there are many journalists who work hard to earn the high status that was accorded to the profession in the past, the news industry as it stands today, by and large, exists mostly to foment outrage and spread strife.

If the media stopped writing shrieking news articles about "X brand promoting Y evil", we could all move on collectively as a society.

> I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most businesses (or many/most businesses that are highly valuable to advertisers) materially concerned enough about association-with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they would switch advertisers over it? Or are advertisers manufacturing family-friendly ad placement as a competitive selling point that their customers never really asked for?

I've worked in a couple of digital advertising roles (mea culpa) and brand safety is a very big deal. No-one wants their product associated with porn, extremism, or even politics. eXtwitter's revenue implosion due to advertisers pulling out (pun not entirely intended) is one recent example of the importance placed on brand safety.

That's what I'm curious about. Are advertisers insisting that brand safety is hyper-important and businesses are going along (or starting to believe it after enough repetition)? Or are businesses independently bringing that constraint to advertisers? If the latter, why do businesses believe that--is it based in evidence of bottom-line risk to the business (customers will leave in proportion to brand-safety-compromising ad misplacement), or is it a more subjective combination of risk aversion and distaste for brand-unsafe content?

Yet somehow being a nuisance streamer on platforms like twitch or kik still yields insane profits. Just don't show your ass and you'll never get banned for anything. Bonkers.

Religion is the source of that nonsense. Help bring it down any legal way possible. Ridicule it, expose it, help people realise it's just a bunch of fairytales, most often useless and sometimes actually damaging.

Sounds like a very religious way to handle your issues

Your are correct. Religion taught me this. So why not let it backfire on them.

Yes, when they famously declared "there's no sex in USSR" it was because USSR was a theocracy.

Communism was a religion.

As much as science is a religion.

So, you extend the definition of a religion to "everything a lot of people support" and then declare that it needs to be "brought down". How does it work for you - you plan to ban people from agreeing on anything, and thus enshrine world peace?

There are plenty of feminists that are as militantly atheistic as they are militantly anti-pornography/prostitution/female nudity. The modern Moral Majority isn't just composed of religionists anymore.

I would have to pick my jaw up off the floor if militant feminists composed even 2% of the general population.

you are right in calling out these people are a tiny portion of the population, yet here in 2024, their numbers don't seem to matter... as they have been wildly successful in moving the overton window

In summary, they are a tiny % , but by no means insignificant in terms of impact.

Just to calibrate your sense of scale: 1% of the United States population is still 3 million people.

It's not a head poll, it's who has influence. One NYT columnist has more influence on the politics of the society than 1000 people in rural Appalachia. Influence is not distributed equally, it's very heavily skewed.

Moral majority or vocal majority?

My phrasing was made in reference to the political movement largely associated with Jerry Falwell. Despite the name, the movement never lived up to either aspects of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority

Okay but would you want your ads on a porn site if the business was yours? That makes it seem like you approve of that behavior (e.g. drug use, gore, etc).

What does porn have to do with drug use and gore?

It makes you approve nothing, but for sure in the US it makes you a target for the vocal moralists. Leading to boycots (which might kill you), dubious free publicity (which you might feel is worth it or not), and extra regulation (which might kill you).

Where did pharmaceuticals and gore come into this?

There are valid social reasons for rejecting the cheap manipulation of people using addictive visual patterns that have nothing to do with religion but do relate to ethics. Even if no humans are hurt in the creation of the content, humans can be harmed by its addictive consumption.

> Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement.

Which is weird, given that "sex sells."

It needs to be teased not given away.

> If music be the food of love, play on; > Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, > The appetite may sicken, and so die.

The point is actually to suggest sex. Keep you aroused, but not let you finish.

Imagine, if Budweiser ran a brothel and buying their beer actually got you laid. You'd get laid, forget about sex for a while, and the association between the beer and sex would not entice you to buy the product.

What doesn't make sense to me is why the major ad networks don't just have a setting for advertising on NSFW sites, or for that matter on NSFW pages.

They're just leaving money on the table. Ads are sold at auction, so the auction price on NSFW pages would be lower, but because it would be lower then some advertisers would want the discount. The alternative is that the ad network bans them and gets nothing, the advertiser loses out on cheap impressions and the site goes bankrupt.

Sites like Deviant Art could have a policy to the effect of "NSFW content is allowed but you have to mark it" and then advertisers who don't want to be seen next to NSFW content, aren't. Hypothetically some user could post something NSFW without marking it, but the same is true on sites that ban NSFW content entirely.

Then the site itself gets the full payment on the majority of pages that are safe for work, still gets something from the ones that aren't, and doesn't have to deal with shady malware-laden ad networks.

> What doesn't make sense to me is why the major ad networks don't just have a setting for advertising on NSFW sites, or for that matter on NSFW pages.

Two main reasons:

- Websites cannot accurately classify content a lot of the time without human review. Ads are served dynamically, so they could appear on a NSFW post faster than a human can review it. It's less work to simply optimize for as little NSFW as possible.

- NSFW content consumers aren't valuable to advertisers or ad network operators because they don't sell products that could be placed as a 'contextual' ad. Ad platforms need insurance brokers, banks and CPG brands to make up the fat tail of revenue. That stuff can be placed next to posts about pretty much anything. NSFW content on the other hand doesn't work the same way, which is why ads on porn sites are for scam dating sites and unregulated erection pills.

The first "kosher" brand that advertises on NSFW contexts can take my money.

It still wouldn't work in the way you think it might. Advertising is about keeping something "top of mind", companies won't want to link their brand in someone's mind to when they're pounding off.

This is doubly so considering the use of remarketing cookies. While you're watching something that's bound to fill you with regret moments after the fact, you won't want to see an ad showing the Amazon products you were browsing previously.

> Websites cannot accurately classify content a lot of the time without human review.

This is the same whether NSFW content is banned or not. "It's banned but somebody posted it anyway" has no apparent solutions different than the problem of "the user is required to mark it but they didn't."

As an obvious example, adult content is nominally banned on sites like TikTok, and yet there are thousands of TikTok accounts that serve as the funnel for OnlyFans, with the creators dancing on the line of the site's policy (and often crossing it), only to create a new account and carry on if they get banned.

> NSFW content consumers aren't valuable to advertisers or ad network operators because they don't sell products that could be placed as a 'contextual' ad.

Which is fine because the ad slots are sold at auction. The ad network's choices are to get something or get nothing.

Allowing adult content puts your site in the same category as every porn site on the internet. Maybe it doesn't make much sense but that's just how they play it. It's not literally seeing your ad directly next to a NSFW image, brands don't even want to be on the same domain as homoerotic sonic the hedgehog fan art.

edit: sibling comment has a better explanation which I think is probably 100% on the nose for this one.

They are leaving money on the table. More than that, they have funded deliberate efforts to find out the non-conforming site and kick them out of their network and that's not free.

It's a deliberate, active decision and its cost. That's policy. Prioritized over cost and profit.

In the US, there is often concern that the more valuable clients or end-users might otherwise boycot their product, or get them regulated even further. A concern that their are under pressure to do that, or else face even more costly consequences. (And they are. It's a very vocal part of society that's puritan.)

For what it's worth, I really think DeviantArt should have focused much more on the other revenue sources and abandoned display ads. I'm not sure how that would have turned out but I suspect it might have been good for the company. The sponsorships were far more aligned with the interests of deviantArt's users and I think it was a significant source of revenue that could have been expanded with the right focus and execution. I'm pretty sure that sponsorships amounted to $60k to $150k per deal which usually ran for 1 or 2 weeks with a sponsored art contest, judging and awarding prizes, it wasn't a lot of administrative work for deviantArt AFAIK.

Then credit card payment processing/PayPal would have been weaponized earlier, and the result would be the same.

It's App Store. Centralized censorship through App Store destroyed the Internet.

For what it's worth, a very very long time ago, when it was just getting going, 500px had me design a go to market for them, that is what I designed.

Interesting!

It's still an issue for most publishing on the internet. How to fund it. Advertising is still the obvious, easy way. Not much else comes to that level of available funding. Subscriptions are next - but then again most of them only if you can accept credit cards - same problem again.

How does 4chan fund itself?

Apparently investment from a Japanese toy company, Good Smile[0,1], and the pockets of its current wealthy owner Hiroyuki Nishimura[2].

[0]https://www.polygon.com/23662953/good-smile-company-4chan-se...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31553474

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroyuki_Nishimura

It has ads and you can pay for a subscription to remove captchas and allow VPN/Tor access (from memory).

> It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks [...]

It's funny how significant percent of Facebook ads I see are an outright scam, phishing etc.

It's been like that for years.

Back in 2012 there was a very large gap between the quality of ads on Google AdSense vs. all of the other options. DeviantArt was banned from using google adsense and thus had to run ads much more similar to the crap you see on Facebook these days.

imo once the suicide girls and the suzi9mm stuff started to be "the thing" - and we allowed a bunch of people from that crew into GD, things started to change really quickly. Honestly, I hated it so much, it made me really upset. I have no issue with that style of art, but it really took over the narrative for a while, and that was silly, and I'm still surprised some 20+ years later it was allowed to happen.

Who or what do you think it "was allowed" by? Nothing kills an edgy contemporary art platform faster than censorship, plus they would've got bogged down endlessly in fights about you let someone away with x so why are you blocking y. The place is called DeviantArt FFS.

I'm happy to say it: Daniel and Richard. But especially Daniel.

> Nothing kills an edgy contemporary art platform faster than censorship

I don't know the solution but isn't 4chan an example of what happens with no censorship? That would also kill an edgy contemporary art platform as the "4 teh lulz" crowd drowns out the "for the art" crowd.

As another semi-related example. Imgur used to be interesting "images" but now 25-75% are posts of text (like a screenshot of a tweet for example, or of a blog post, etc...). That might be good for Imgur's bottom line, I don't know, but it's not the site it started as.

To be the site it started as would require somehow disallowing images of text but magically allow meme images (some text). That might end up starting an arms race as users skew their messages onto billboards, tvs, signs, and other things to try to make them not look like just an image.

Like I said above, I have no idea if they want the site to be mostly images instead of mostly text. Only that it's another site that changed character over time and I'm sure didn't start as a site expecting mostly images of text.

4chan has censorship and extensive and active moderation but the levels for what is acceptable are lower than most other sites. Unlike Reddit, moderators are hidden there's no way to know if a user is a mod or not. I like this way of removing ego and moderator abuse but this makes the place seem more chaotic, unaccountable and lawless.

In theory it's possible to have the same kind of site with the regular family friendly content and with strict (i.e. normal) levels of moderation. In practice we don't see this.

I think it's because the levels of active moderation by humans needs to be high. So 4chan can get away with less spent on moderation because their levels are lower.

> but this makes the place seem more chaotic, unaccountable and lawless

That's how exactly how reddit mods operate, no?

Reddit admins, employed by the site serve as a line of (corporate) enforcement.

Otherwise, reddit isn't a democracy, the mods can do what they want (within limits set by the admins), just like they can do what they want here.

Perhaps Ironically, (or perhaps just tellingly), there was a very large overlap between the 4chan and DeviantArt user base back when I worked there.

Unfortunately, Imgur also largely ceased being memes and / or discussion board include image storage (Reddit) and starting being a lot of TikTok / Vine / Youtube Short cross-posts. "Here's my dog / cat, my dog / cat's cute." "Here's us in our car, we're very clever." "Here's us in softcore dress-up, look at how attractive we are." There's memes, just not that many unless you mostly subscribe to sub domains (#meme, ect...).

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