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Comment by wiseowise | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Hey, publisher here. We tend to look at our competition and do half or less the number of ads. That means there's an ad unit every sixth node, not every two paragraphs (so three paragraphs, two images an embed or five paragraphs or whatever). The video player doesn't stick if you're a member, because we are partially member-supported. If you'd like to see fewer ads you can become a member!

I appreciate the comment. FWIW, I understand you need to survive and I also think it's not the worst I've seen.

Thanks, it's tough being a small publisher. Many of our competitors use a ton of ads, which screws with ad rates, and we use the usual off-the-shelf tools, but people still get mad that we have any ads. It's exciting.

Or use reader mode and/or an adblocker

Thanks for taking time to reply. Taking another look at your website - it does behave differently compared to websites that abuse ads. I’ve spent too much time with abusive pages which triggered the overreaction.

Judging by active discussion in comments and loyal followers, the website is a loved one. Kudos for keeping good community alive.

Apologies for inappropriate comment.

> Autoplaying sticky video

Not only autoplaying, but I've got my browser settings so screwed with and tuned that I haven't had a video autoplay on me in at least a year, and this one broke right through.

They should be proud. It's probably the most invasive ad on the web.

It shouldn't be playing sound, so I hope that didn't happen. Also, we use one of the three biggest off-the-shelf video players. We're a very small independent publisher so it's not like we tuned it specially. In fact, we put more restrictions on the video player than most of our competitors (and make less money because of it).

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