The relentless (and annoying) pursuit of eyeballs | Hacker News Reader

The relentless (and annoying) pursuit of eyeballs

kensegall.com

29 pointssrikar15 comments

I've worked on 5-6 high traffic content sites in my 15 year career. The problem with Internet advertising is likely the part that people first loved about it: immediate analytics.

Here's the problem. When every action you get paid for is a metric, it forces those metrics to eventually be corrupted. Need CPM eyeballs? We solved that one decades ago... link rings. Today's link ring is outbrain, nrelate and the rest. Here, we'll put web sugar on our pages with bikinis and top 10 lists. Eyeballs you have. Doesn't matter that the site sells itself as a tech magazine, it's real traffic is comic con photos of Jean Grey. No one will know.

Maybe you get paid for clicks. OK. We have solutions for that too. Let's put adwords in the page. Let's style them to look like navigation. Let's create popovers with super tiny close buttons that purposefully have their display and href off by a few pixels. Let's delay it to load so that we can likely grab a rogue accidental click as well. Smaller screen, less precision as you do in mobile? Perfect, even better. We'll autoplay movies one after the other, but only if we have an ad. There's a system to all of this.

Then of course you run into the engineers and executives that simply don't care. The Internet to them isn't the democratization of knowledge, it's an opportunity. "People want to click on Bikinis, why do you care". The problem of course is ads become a pattern. Once one large site falls into selling a certain system, the rest fall like dominos. Because the ad providers aren't going to create unique ads per site.

Meanwhile I was building very genuine, audience driven sites that were doing a hundreds of thousands of people a day. Mostly, believe it or not, DIRECT traffic. It doesn't matter. You can't compete with 10s of millions from link arbitrage, 99% referral traffic. You're not a big site. You don't matter. Sure we'd get hundreds of real comments and discussion per story, but there's only three-hundred thousand people on the site, who cares.

The problem of course is this is just as big a problem for the content producers themselves. They go to work day to day and get beaten over the head to make cheap, quick content that attracts the most viewers. The shotgun approach, something will hit. For the first couple years they fight it out, but eventually they give up too. It's easy.

There are companies solely dedicated to this. They create cheap content with little or no value, a getty image subscription, and siphon links from larger, less valuable networks like yahoo and aol. They pay 1 cent for the link and charge 2 for the ad. These quick, pop-up sites feature some sort of vertical branding (cars, babies...etc) and sell their growth to unknowlegable ad-buyers. Look, we're a brand new car site that's getting 2 million uniques a day!

It's depresses me sometimes. It was hard to work around that kind of scam and not dip to those levels. The pressure is always immense. If you just use such and such dark pattern, you can solve all your problems.

I really hope things like Patreon work out. I'd love to see people paying for smart content. It's needs to be easier than it is.

It's of course not all bad. On the positive, small scale publishing by the individual is as healthy as ever. A good quarter of the links you'll read on this page today are on somebody's blog, containing no ads and featuring real, genuine ideas and knowledge.

Love all the examples you provide. Would love to combine your knowledge with mine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8057629) and others who have more to say on this and publish a well written case.

As to alternatives to ad revenue, what are your thoughts on approaches like Patreon vs web micropayments or this idea of mine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009959)?

The problem is that the default price of consumption on the internet has become FREE.

Just because the price to transmit content on the internet is negligible, doesn't mean the price to PRODUCE it is also negligible.

It's one of the most severe problems with the internet...its default business model isn't realistic.

I agree, but it's an absolute fallacy that consumption is free. In fact, it is more much more expensive with ads:

1. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch.

2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author. Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments.

3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want (what we want only indirectly and secondarily, if at all). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as well as design that optimizes advertising revenue. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.

4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive cost of all.

Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free versions. A system to make that convenient is possible, but we're too hooked on ads to even try.

[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]

"Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn’t exist without it."

The author nails the two sources of the problem, that advertising drives the internet, and that everyone believes we have no choice.

This is a fantastic post, and nails down one of the most frustrating contradictions I encounter online: People whose salaries are ultimately paid by advertisers complaining about low income people making self-sabotaging decisions.

Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically coercion. If it pays for things we love it's because we're indirectly paying for them + the advertising industry.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

And thanks for the +1. I usually get downvoted on HN whenever I raise this issue, because many HN'ers do get their salaries ultimately from advertisers.

Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically coercion

Not even close. An ad can make a decent amount of money if it does one of three things: show me a new place where I can get a need that I have solved, or show me a solution to a problem or need that I know I have that didn't know had a solution or, and this is the most tangential and the one that is most difficult to do - shows me a need or a problem I didn't know I had and a solution to that (this is what people often complain about as superficial, but if I see a sign saying "most people pay more tax than they have to, lets us do your taxes and save" that might get me thinking).

There is no coercion there, the information itself is valuable to me and the advertiser.

The trouble with most ads, and the reason people think they suck in general, is that most of them are for crappy products because crappy products, in general, need more advertising. Great products need advertising too but not so much.

You're right in principle but not in practice, as you yourself point out in your final paragraph.

How are users supposed to know which ads are honest, and which ads are crappy products spun as great? And if crappy products far outnumber quality ones (case in point, how much of the content on the web do you think is garbage?), how does advertising achieve what you claim in your second paragraph?

And even for those non-crappy products, how much incentive is there for sellers to tell half-truths to increase sales? "Here is my great product (but I won't tell you about this other better or cheaper product that I know about, and in fact, I'm buying this ad to make sure that that upstart competitor never even has a chance! It's so nice that my established market dominance pays for my wide and deep advertising mote!)"

See this thread for more on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733941

Absolutely! I agree with pretty much everything you said. I meant 'free' in a superficial way, but it's clear that ultimately, there are costs.

I recently wrote a post drawing parallels between the ad-driven economy to the debt-driven economy, and how both damage our lives and economies in similar ways. You might find it interesting:

http://livefreeortry.com/2014/04/30/silicon-valley-data-is-t...

I found it very interesting. As I replied to snide's comment herein, I would love to collaborate with others who see this clearly to help other see this clearly.

After writing that post, I was all fired up to work on a micro-payment solution of the type you mentioned in one of your other posts...but then I lost motivation. Cheeky landing page:

http://stevejain.com/penthouse/

How can I contact you?

EDIT: just sent you an email.

Please tell that to academic journals, especially when the published material was paid for by taxes.

The Patreon campaign for my ongoing web comic[1] hit a milestone this week. I'd promised that when I hit $50/page, I'd turn off the ads. Now they're gone. No distractions, just the comic, and a polite note at the end of every few chapters asking people to consider supporting me on Patreon, buying some stuff, or telling their friends about the comic.

I dunno if this model is sustainable in the long run; if nobody has ads I'm not sure how I'd have gotten eyeballs on my comic in the first place. It's not something that's dripping with viral shareability; it's a dense, long-form work best consumed in chapter-sized chunks. And I've still got a ways to go before it's paying my rent. But it's working for me right here, right now.

1: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/

Try this if you have a windows machine.

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

I have yet to see some a video advertisement on any site, and text ones are almost nonexistent on popular websites.

Most online ads are just for bad or useless products. Why would I ever want to buy a Win8 phone? Iphone or Android I get, maybe even a dumb phone when I run out of power, but a Win 8?

Even Facebook, which already has so many of my private details, can't show me better ads than for a fifth-rate dating site and and Iphone cover from some China Export service.

Of course when you make an ad jump around in front of people, they will try to find a way to get rid of it, so they might click on it by accident - and so you get a bit higher click-throughs.

We are reaching a point where there just aren't enough good products to satisfy the demand for ad inventory (at least at the given price) and so they have to get worse and worse products that can only afford it if they use crappy and annoying ads.

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