creinhardt

As far as I know, the weather.gov api is hosted out of a single facility (the NCEP NCO), and if that building has any sort of network issue, the api goes down. At the very least it seems like using some sort of CDN would provide a bit more resiliency, but maybe there are infrastructure constraints that make this difficult.

And it has a built in printer? SOLD

This is a great idea! Is there an online version of this installation anywhere? Or a list of cameras you use? Also, love those VFD displays!

I did something similar with the public webcam feed from the top of Mt Hood in Oregon. Made a lil script that posts/tweets a time lapse of the sunrise and sunset each day: https://whatcoloristilikumcrossingrightnow.com/timberlineSun...

Also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mthoodsunrise

My hunch on this was that there probably was a misconfiguration with whatever service they're using to send out emails. If they don't have the sending domain whitelisted with whatever service they're using, it can look super fishy (or phishy!). I'd be really, really surprised to find out that Google's automated AdSense ad quality tools are in any way tied to their email quality tools.

This. Having been in a similar scenario, the most frustrating part is hearing "there's a problem, it's bad enough that we're disabling your account, but we can't even give you a hint what the actual issue was. We hope you can figure it out, maybe we'll eventually re-instate your account".

In my experience, you can usually find something that COULD be the cause by digging through analytics/reports, if you can demonstrate that you took positive action on this, and get it infront of the right support people, they can sometimes help you out and ask for your account to be re-evaluated. You will never, ever find out if this is the reason they disabled your account in the first place though.

Then, prepare for your account to be paused again.

Most medium to large media companies do have their own sales staff for online advertising! The problem generally is that they can't sell enough local/direct-sold ads at a high enough CPM to sell out their inventory. This is where they use something like AdSense, to fill in those gaps where they couldn't sell anything for a higher rate.

Also, I'd love to see ad serving go back to direct sold simple images and links, with no tracking or programmatic targeting involved at all. Obviously for 99% of websites this is impossible, but it'd be more equitable long term.

I often wonder how the web would have evolved differently if early in the HTML spec an <ad> html tag was added that just had a SRC and href attribute.

Google's true customers are the people buying ads in the first place. They could care less about publishers.

Banning one publisher (unless it's truly massive), isn't going to have much effect to Google's bottom line, so they err on the side of protecting the 'quality' of places ads can be served, at all costs. This also comes through when you see 'invalid traffic' deductions on your AdSense income reports, as i'm sure almost every account running AdSense does, along with the seemingly random crawler errors mentioned in the article. They don't feel the need to explain themselves, and can withhold the revenue at the excuse of 'protecting' the advertiser's side of things.

I think the NYT (and other very large publishers, WSJ, etc.) are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to subscription revenue.

For a newspaper that serves a small town/mid size city there is a fixed number of people they can sell subscriptions to. Compound that with digital ads being worth a fraction of what a print ad is worth and you have a problem. A print ad is still a bigger revenue driver.

I think people tend to underestimate how most publishers don't rely on subscription revenue to survive. All the money is in advertising, which is why I think you see less focus on trying alternative subscription models like this. It's a great idea in theory, but in practice probably wouldn't provide enough revenue to be worth it for medium to small publishers.

Also, say this middleman company does exist and is adopted by a large portion of the publishers out there. How would it benefit them to pass along the majority of that $1 per article to publishers? My hunch is that publishers would be the ones that end up getting 'crumbs' and the middleman would keep the bulk.

Publishers have been burned over the years by relying on other companies and middlemen for traffic and revenue (look at the effect Facebook has had on most news organizations, and not in a good way). Putting all their chips in one basket with a company like this would be a non-starter for most companies. They don't want to get burned again.

Yeah, this is the best one of these i've seen! Here's a SFW version too: https://www.goshdarnwebsite.com/

A SFW version: https://www.goshdarnwebsite.com