[HN Gopher] New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising...
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New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data
Author : jbegley
Score : 923 points
Date : 2020-05-19 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| safog wrote:
| How is everyone being blind to the fact that they will now simply
| start collecting their own user data and do targeted ads by
| themselves? And yes this includes potentially sensitive stuff
| like location data, not just NYT reading history. Adverts are not
| going away and they're not going subscription only, they're just
| going to figure out what ads to run by themselves instead of
| relying on 3rd parties.
|
| Imagine every single publisher does this and how many security
| holes that will open. Sure maybe you trust NYT to generally do
| the right thing with data (very debatable) but what happens when
| Buzzfeed does this? Do you think they'll adopt sensible data
| collection policies? What about the S*n?
|
| What about the data they collect? Can we guarantee that they
| simply won't become data brokers again? I would much rather have
| entrenched players like G / FB collect and take the blame for
| privacy misses than have every single organization build their
| own leaky data collection systems.
| tootie wrote:
| They pretty much are subscription only at this point already.
| Secondly, just because they aren't serving third-party cookies
| doesn't mean they are rolling their own tracking service. You
| can convert a third-party cookie to first party with a DNS
| entry. It just prevents browsers from sharing data.
| safog wrote:
| Err.. but they are rolling their own tracking service + ad
| exchange. They say they will create user segments that
| advertisers can use to target ads - that is basically an ad
| exchange. Instead of advertisers using AdWords (or whatever
| they currently use to advertise on NYT), they will use a
| custom built NYTWords to run their ads.
|
| What I meant by subscription only is that their revenues
| won't be purely through subscription - ad revenue is still
| going to be a very significant part of their total revenues -
| they're not simply ditching it.
| tootie wrote:
| It doesn't say they are building it from scratch. It says
| they are offering an exchange on top of whatever data is
| collected. This could easily be done on top of another
| platform. It may not be Adobe/Google/Facebook, but this is
| a huge market and they'd be nuts to reinvent the wheel.
| look_lookatme wrote:
| It's in the Axios story...
|
| https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1262757541710139392
| jokoon wrote:
| Why don't websites propose to host the ads instead?
|
| That way they can hardly be avoided (I think?), and users can't
| really complain about being tracked unless the websites really
| use something that tracks their users.
|
| I would guess advertisers really want to track users, and they
| want to check if websites really display those ads, but they just
| could check at random.
| travisporter wrote:
| Off topic but I still cannot unsubscribe from NYT online after
| signing up online. I have to call in during their business hours.
| I thought CA passed a law prohibiting this dark pattern.
| sequoia wrote:
| Watch out-if you signed up with a CC they take that as consent
| to re-subscribe you year after year. They did this to me, when
| I called they said "you authorized re-subscription when you
| paid by credit card. Paying by credit card automatically auto-
| renews." Mind you this is not a $20/month renewal but an annual
| renewal for hundreds of dollars, so it was not small potatoes.
| I am 100% certain I never checked a box specifically & clearly
| opting in to auto-renewal. There's absolutely no way I'd do
| that for a $300+ charge.
|
| I had to call and pitch a fit to get them to at least stop
| sending papers (to my old address, I don't live in the USA any
| more) and give me a prorated refund. They were completely shady
| and untrustworthy, I'll never do business with them again.
| whakim wrote:
| So I couldn't find the ability to subscribe annually
| (https://www.nytimes.com/subscription only offers me a weekly
| subscription) but at least right now they're pretty damn
| upfront that you're giving them your credit card and
| authorizing a recurring payment until you cancel:
|
| "Your payment method will be automatically charged $4.00
| every 4 weeks for the first year ($1.00 per week).
|
| It will then be automatically charged $17.00 every 4 weeks
| thereafter, starting on (date) ($4.25 per week).
|
| Your subscription will continue until you cancel. You can
| cancel anytime."
|
| In your case, you may not have checked a box, but I'd be
| shocked if there wasn't similar language saying that you were
| opting in to a recurring payment. (It's not as if they're
| making you read a 5000-word EULA - it's right there front and
| center on the page in my case.) Not to mention that this is
| pretty standard practice across subscription-based
| businesses.
|
| I do think it is good form for subscriptions to give
| customers advance notice of when their subscriptions will
| renew, though, and most don't. I would go so far as saying
| that I wouldn't mind if this was a requirement.
| sequoia wrote:
| I'm not suggesting that the NYT corporation didn't have
| their bases covered legally, I'm sure it said _somewhere_
| that my subscription would autorenew, but I assure you it
| wasn 't plain or obvious. In fact that is _not_ what I 'm
| used to from periodicals, which is part of why I was
| surprised. I have subscribed to magazines many times in my
| life, and I'm used to getting many "your subscription is
| about to run out" "only 2 issues left!" "last issue!
| Resubscribe today!" notifications with the magazines.
| Presumably this is what the times does as well if you
| subscribe in cash or check.
|
| What really bothered me was they took the _payment method
| itself_ as an indication that I wanted a different type of
| subscription. Check? 1 year subscription. Cash? 1 year
| subscription. Credit card? oh ho! You obviously want to
| subscribe from now until the end of eternity! And yes, they
| told me on the phone that my _use of a CC_ was indication
| that I wanted to autorenew and that there 's not a way to
| pay with CC that doesn't autorenew (at the time I spoke
| with them in early 2018).
|
| Basically to the NYT: "because of the payment method you
| used, we are _able to_ keep billing you " = "you must
| _want_ us to keep billing you! " and that is complete
| bullshit.
| whakim wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that your experience was
| otherwise; I apologize if it came off that way! The point
| I was making was just that this doesn't seem to be the
| case anymore, at least as far as I could find - it's
| pretty clearly stated upfront what you will be billed and
| when. This should always be the case.
|
| May I ask how you subscribed? I agree it's pretty shady
| to offer multiple payment methods side-by-side with
| different terms, but I also haven't seen a lot of online
| merchants accepting cash/check.
|
| I should have made it more clear that auto-renewing seems
| like the default specifically for subscriptions made
| online through the web or an app.
| sequoia wrote:
| I forget, probably online. I was one of the many after
| Trump's election who thought "oh dang! I'd better start
| actually financially supporting the news reporting
| organizations upon whom I (and the nation) rely!" I later
| moved out of the country & I was informed that
| transferring my subscription was impossible (I'm in
| Toronto) and that was that.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| A bit off topic, but this pattern is the worst. It happened
| to me with Hellosign. I signed up for the free trial and
| never remembered to cancel. I saw the charge last year and
| thought "oh well," then forgot to cancel again this year. I
| literally did not login even once for a year, but then like
| clockwork they charged me $140. What annoyed me is that it
| seemed like they intentionally went radio silent for a year,
| so as to not remind me I was using their service. I received
| no marketing emails, no pre-billing email, and no receipt.
| They just silently charged me $140.
|
| To their credit, they refunded me when I complained about
| this.
|
| Personally I think it should be illegal to renew annual
| subscriptions without some kind of reminder that the bill is
| coming up, or an opportunity to cancel at some point,
| especially if you never even used the service. Heck, I might
| go so far as to say that annual billing should not be
| allowed.
| snazz wrote:
| Some credit card companies and banks will send you
| proactive reminders that you're about to be charged for an
| auto-renewal. If I'm purchasing a subscription, one of the
| advantages of doing so through an in-app purchase on iOS is
| that you get reminders and receipts from Apple.
| wastedhours wrote:
| I think that's what the new SCA regulations in Europe help
| with - they require confirmation and authorisation even for
| some recurring subscriptions so auto-renew becomes less of
| a blind process.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| The Economist had the same issue, I wrote an angry email to
| their support and they fixed it.
|
| They did win though, I ended up subscribed for a few months
| more than I wanted to.
| WillSlim95 wrote:
| I unsubscribe by changing to a debit card with zero balance.
| gowld wrote:
| Does this work, avoiding bank fees?
| baseballdork wrote:
| I haven't tried to cancel or anything but I pay with a card
| I created from privacy that has a $5 monthly limit. When
| the price jumps after the introductory period, it'll just
| decline.
| thanksforfish wrote:
| You just stop paying for things you use?
| baseballdork wrote:
| No, it'll decline and alert me so I can go ahead and
| cancel the subscription. Then I might go subscribe to the
| LA Times or some other news source.
| GhostVII wrote:
| I think you can still be held liable for whatever they
| couldn't charge to your debit card if you do that. Preventing
| them from charging you doesn't mean you don't owe them money.
| wdb wrote:
| Wouldn't this quickly become a costly affair?
| fastball wrote:
| Bloomberg does the same.
| ridv wrote:
| California did [1]. I was a customer of the NYT online a few
| months after this law went into effect and I also had to call
| in during business hours which are Eastern Time centric. They
| try to sell you super hard on staying.
|
| Someone else here said this can save you money this way, but
| the salesman I got came back at me with an offer to stay for
| the same price I was already paying.
|
| Between them not complying with CA law (I'm a resident of CA)
| and them showing me ads when I pay them, I decided to end my
| subscription for good.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/04/californias-new-online-can...
| Kique wrote:
| I don't think this is true, on my account (also signed up
| online) I can go to the below link and click "Cancel
| Subscription" then choose the Use Account option instead of
| calling in or using their customer service chat.
|
| https://myaccount.nytimes.com/seg/subscription
| yonig wrote:
| I just did the chat option and it put me in a queue to wait
| for an "Account specialist" that is estimated to take 25
| minutes. Other two options were phone call or text. I
| actually did intend to cancel today so ill see this through.
|
| edit: chat took 30 minutes from start to cancel. mostly dead
| air. when the chat starts they also asked for a phone number
| (which i never gave, so it wasnt for ID confirmation) but i
| instead just entered 'NA'
| robbiet480 wrote:
| Just checked and I don't have a Use Account link. Just call,
| text or chat.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| I canceled NYT online recently but couldn't do the same for
| WSJ.
| travisporter wrote:
| I really looked for a link on mobile website , the iOS app
| and the desktop website. I subscribed via iOS so maybe it's a
| bit complex.
| subpixel wrote:
| As much as this sucks, it probably reduces churn a ton.
|
| Also - the reason they do that is so they can offer you a
| radical discount that isn't "published" to keep you from
| canceling. I did this a few weeks ago and saved more than 50%.
| mikestew wrote:
| This is why I only subscribe to publications through iTunes/App
| Store. One click, and I'm unsubscribed. Not on the Apple store?
| Then I will not be rewarding your dark pattern. I don't need to
| read _anything_ that badly.
| p49k wrote:
| Oftentimes, a subscription purchased through the App Store is
| 30% more expensive than through other means due to companies
| passing on the Apple tax to the user.
| hedora wrote:
| Call them. Ask to cancel. If the call takes more than 5
| minutes, call your credit card company and issue a chargeback,
| explaining that you attempted to cancel online, and also
| attempted to contact them. It costs the vendor money when you
| do this, and if enough people do it, they lose the ability to
| accept credit cards.
|
| The process is usually painless, since the card issuer has a
| financial incentive to screw over the vendor. Some credit card
| companies will even block charges from a company moving
| forward.
|
| One of the credit reporting agencies (Experian?) started
| charging one of my cards without permission. I don't know how
| they even got the number, so I did this.
|
| The credit card company operator said a double digit percentage
| of the call center load was blocking that particular credit
| agency, and did it with no further questions. I have no idea
| why they weren't kicked off the processing network for elevated
| fraud rates.
| travisporter wrote:
| I ended up chatting with them and cancelling. Initially the
| wait was 17 min but I got an agent within 1-2 min fortunately
| and cancelled aftertrying to sell me on the perks. Not too
| pushy and relatively pleasant.
|
| This is a good strategy though in the future. I can show
| proof I tried to cancel by phone/online to my credit card
| company.
| abawany wrote:
| I've subscribed to NYT using PayPal so I could cancel the pre-
| approval there to cancel if I needed. However, I have been able
| to get a hold of them via chat every time I've needed it so I
| am not super worried.
| sammycdubs wrote:
| One of the few things I use my Apple Card for is online
| subscriptions. One click in the app and you change your card
| number immediately!
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not sure how the Apple Card system works, but Visa has a
| program that I was affected by. I had a card that needed to
| be replaced before its expiration date. I intentionally did
| not go online to update it anywhere. I wanted to start
| receiving emails from all of the sites that the previous card
| was registered as I was specifically looking for sites the
| card might have been registered without my knowledge.
| However, Netflix pays into the Visa program so that they can
| find out that new card number and automatically start using
| it without me doing anything.
| wereHamster wrote:
| There used to be a service which allowed you to create
| virtual CC numbers. That way you could create a new number
| for each service. Just like some people create a new email
| address when they sign up online.
| tzs wrote:
| Capital One and Citi let you create virtual CC numbers.
|
| Bank of America used to, but they discontinued that feature
| a few months ago, saying that with electronic wallets such
| as Apple Pay and similar that do not disclose your card
| number to the merchant there is no longer a need for
| virtual CC numbers.
|
| I've got a couple Capital One cards and their virtual
| numbers are quite convenient. They are created from their
| Eno browser extension. Invoke Eno on the checkout page of a
| site, and it lets you pick and existing virtual card or
| lets you create a new one for that site.
|
| I use it on Firefox, but recently the Eno extension
| disappeared from the Firefox extensions store, and they no
| longer list Firefox as a supported browser (although
| existing installations continue to work). If this is
| permanent it will not be as convenient for Firefox users--
| they will have to use Chrome to create new virtual cards,
| which they can of course still use in Firefox.
|
| On your account pages at C1 you can view your virtual
| numbers, suspend them, and delete them but you cannot
| create new ones. That has to be done through the Eno
| browser extension.
|
| I have no idea what Citi's virtual card system is like.
| snazz wrote:
| Privacy.com still exists and does exactly that. Most
| services that offer free trials (like the $300 Google Cloud
| Platform credit/trial) don't accept virtual credit card
| numbers because it would allow someone to use an infinite
| free trial.
| thanksforfish wrote:
| Surely changing a card number doesn't communicate your intent
| to unsubscribe from any service where you have an ongoing
| subscription. It prevents the bill payment, but doesn't stop
| the subscription and any costs associated.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I don't know if the NYT does this, but with some services, if
| you invalidate your card without formally canceling, they
| treat it as ever-increasing unpaid debt and eventually send
| you to collections, and then you've entered the hell world of
| aggressive debt collectors and potential damage to your
| credit.
| jeffkeen wrote:
| Years ago I subscribed online to the physical NYT paper, and
| eventually after letting papers stack up I wanted to
| unsubscribe for a while. But after having to speak to a
| slippery trained retention specialist in order to do so... I
| instead decided to unsubscribe forever. So yeah, good job NYT.
|
| That pattern is something I'd expect from Sirius XM or Lifetime
| Fitness, and the fact that they did it too was a little
| surprising.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| They're phasing out _consumption_ of 3rd-party advertising data,
| because they 're transitioning to becoming a provider of 3rd-
| party advertising data:
|
| > Beginning in July, The Times will begin to offer clients 45 new
| proprietary first-party audience segments to target ads.
| nojito wrote:
| None of that is third party data.
|
| NYT is the party segmenting their users and allowing segments
| to be targeted.
| shostack wrote:
| Not sure why you are being downvoted. While they may still
| have relationships with 3rd party data brokers, this sounds
| like a 1st party data play on the surface, particularly since
| data onboarding vendors like Liveramp, etc. still need to
| prove their solutions will work in a post-cookie world after
| the upcoming Chrome update and in the face of increasing
| privacy legislation.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| So when Google segments users and allows the NYT to target
| them, that's third party data, but when the NYT segments
| users and allows e.g. Walmart to target them, it's not?
| MAGZine wrote:
| In one case Google is retailing the ads and talking to
| purchasers. The content is subject to Google's review and
| approval. And, Google has all of the data (quite fine-
| grained, since that's all they do). Because there is a
| third party in the transaction (NYT, consumer, Google), it
| gets the name.
|
| In the latter case, NYT does not share its customer data
| with google. NYT ad dept is responsible for the editorial
| and aesthetic signoff of all advertisements. And, arguably,
| less data collection overall because advertisement is not
| NYT's business strength.
| manigandham wrote:
| First-party is when the provider of the data is also the
| owner of the property where that data was collected and
| used.
|
| Google segments used on Google properties = 1st-party.
| Google segments used on other sites = 3rd-party.
|
| NYT segments used on NYT = 1st-party. NYT segments can't be
| used anywhere else because they don't make them available
| nor do they want to.
| nelaboras wrote:
| It does not seem as if they will give others access to the
| data, rather advertisers can go directly to NYT and choose
| which segments to target.
|
| this seems like a more than reasonable approach - actually
| relevant ads, not pedsonalised ads.
| hedora wrote:
| The ad purchasers are the third parties. The NYT and the
| reader are the other two parties.
| look_lookatme wrote:
| Who knows what will be leaked in the segment data though?
| Spivak wrote:
| Barring a technical blunder why does anything have to be
| leaked in a "here are the customer segments we offer, give
| us an ad and we'll show it to our users and give you a
| report on impressions and clicks" model?
| manigandham wrote:
| No, it's first-party. Advertisers buy NYT audiences as defined
| by NYT itself using its own data.
|
| You can't buy segments or even use them anywhere else so
| there's no 3rd-party access.
| buboard wrote:
| Google finally has some competition! More publishers should do
| this (or Nytimes may end up selling ad services to smaller
| publishers)
| mcculley wrote:
| This is a great step. Will they ever have a pure subscription
| product without advertisements? I really want to see a news
| outlet that serves subscribers.
| markosaric wrote:
| Nice move! One step at a time towards a better and healthier web
| for all users!
| gerland wrote:
| It's a nice move, but probably it will even further deteriorate
| the situation. If NYT had to lower standards due to lack of
| funding, then removing cookies will only speed up the fall. It
| looks like a last resort attempt at trying to save themselves.
| How much credibility does it restore in the end?
| donohoe wrote:
| When I worked there significant percentage of registered users
| were Accountants in Afghanistan earning more than 200K a year.
|
| This was due to the default values of the registration form and
| the tendency for people to be fatigued by the amount of non-
| essential information being asked at the time.
|
| I'm sure thats still there but not so much an issue given the
| time thats passed.
| noja wrote:
| By making it first party by proxying it?
| godshatter wrote:
| Here's a really naive question. The article talks about
| collecting data for some audience segments. Are they talking
| about letting users check checkboxes for the segments they might
| be interested in, or are they going to try to do what the third-
| party advertising companies do, which is try to guess what
| segments their users fall into by hoovering up what data they can
| find about them?
|
| It's crazy to me that there is a multi-billion dollar industry
| focused on trying to guess what ads I might be interested in,
| using lots of privacy-invading techniques that I do my best to
| counter. Did they ever think to just ask me? I might not care
| much about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I
| might be interested in, at least if I could be convinced that
| that's all I would see and that the crazy privacy violations
| would stop.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The pervasiveness is still an issue. And if you offer that kind
| of information you should be paid handsomely, seeing as how
| much money that information may touch over your lifetime.
| mancerayder wrote:
| > It's crazy to me that there is a multi-billion dollar
| industry focused on trying to guess what ads I might be
| interested in, using lots of privacy-invading techniques that I
| do my best to counter. Did they ever think to just ask me? I
| might not care much about ads if it was as simple as declaring
| the categories I might be interested in, at least if I could be
| convinced that that's all I would see and that the crazy
| privacy violations would stop
|
| I could be wrong here, but I think it's because marketing folks
| believe that they know you better than you know yourself. That
| certainly seems the case with salespeople, whose role is to
| pitch something that may not be desired right away.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| It's simpler than that even. They don't care what you
| want/need, they care what you can be convinced to buy.
| asperous wrote:
| It's not a matter of people thinking they know better, but a
| matter of people seeing which approach makes them more money.
| Internet advertising is based on a bidding system which is
| highly tracked.
|
| Advertisers may be bidding too highly on "targeted"
| demographics, but that's outside the issues of organizations
| like New York Times. Its in NYT's best interest to get the
| highest bids possible.
|
| They may have been monitoring the difference in ad prices
| between highly targeted and not, and decided the difference
| no longer worth it.
| manigandham wrote:
| People act differently than what they say they do. The
| problem is data quality and fidelity when spread across the
| web.
|
| When you get clean data like Facebook and Google with their
| first-party access, they can know you better than your own
| friends.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > trying guess what ads I might be interested in,
|
| No, they are trying to guess which add will produce the best
| return in terms of advertiser-sought behavioral changes if
| shown to you. That probably has some overlap with ads you are
| interested in, but it's not the same thing.
|
| > Did they ever think to just ask me?
|
| The ads that it is generally most valuable to show are the ones
| that the target wouldn't expect to have interest in.
| Advertising largely exists to create desire; if you ask people
| what advertising they'd like to see they will identify the
| advertising that would do the least to change their behavior
| from what it would be without the ads, which defeats the point.
| _Untargeted_ ads would probably be more effective.
| selykg wrote:
| I assume what people are interested in is one thing, but things
| they may _need_ is another.
|
| Being able to hoover up information that is more up to date
| than when you last filled out the survey means they could
| potentially be more accurate. i.e. You're shopping for some
| type of product, your search history and browser history
| indicates this, but is outside the realm of what you filled out
| in the survey. Being able to direct some ads that fit your
| current needs could be lucrative.
|
| I'm not an advertiser, but this is just my small bit of thought
| on it. Perhaps others are able to confirm or deny this is
| what's happening.
| cat199 wrote:
| > Did they ever think to just ask me?
|
| This would assume that the goal is to show you what you want to
| see, rather than to show you what advertisers want you to see
| based on what they think you need to see and might respond
| positively to.
| 0xfffafaCrash wrote:
| This is called permission marketing and was advocated for most
| prominently by Seth Godin starting in the late 90's.
|
| Unfortunately for every person in marketing who like Seth Godin
| cares even a little about things like privacy and consent, the
| marketing industry is full of thousands of people who would
| rather ram all kinds of ads as quickly and frequently as
| possible in front of every unwilling eyeball possible to try to
| brainwash as many impressionable people as possible into
| believing they need all kinds of things that they had no
| interest in previously. It's a numbers game. They don't just
| want to sell people things they want or need or would benefit
| from. They don't even want to simply introduce people to
| unexpected solutions for problems they actually have. They want
| to do those things but they also want to exploit every
| psychological weakness possible to introduce new wants and new
| needs and new problems and insecurities into the consciousness
| of their targets because one can't maximize sales without
| psychologically manipulating more people into thinking they
| want or need things they don't.
|
| Ads are primarily exploiting impressionable insecure people
| with poor impulse control.
| zimbatm wrote:
| Does anyone have resources on why it's best to place ads based
| on the user profile instead of based on the related content on
| the page?
|
| Personally, my interest fluctuates quite a lot and is probably
| closer to the current article than a median projection. When I
| want to buy a new thing, that interest is only valid for the
| time until the purchase decision.
|
| It's just an observation and probably naive. But it seems like
| content-based ads could be quite efficient while requiring much
| less privacy-invading tracking.
| manigandham wrote:
| It's highly dependent on the environment.
|
| Sometimes contextual relevancy is the best. Ads on search
| results are contextual since they can be easily aligned to
| what you're looking for.
|
| Other times, the content is generic or there's more info
| about the user (which is usually more behavioral than simple
| interests) and it's better to target that way. For example,
| you may be reading local news but you looked at new shoes
| yesterday, so it's better to show you ads for the shoes and
| try to complete that purchase than generic ads for local
| businesses.
| asdff wrote:
| It just seems like a lazy way to automate ad buys. If you had
| to consider the content on the page and match the ad content
| to the page, that's just more effort and thinking to be done.
| Advertising is dubious enough, companies aren't going to
| pivot like this to see a blip on the radar.
| manigandham wrote:
| That's how Google's billion dollar adwords business works.
| It's not about laziness, it's about the right environment
| to use it in.
| tylersmith wrote:
| What you do and buy is much more accurate information than what
| you say. A form of preferences will never be as effective as
| surveillance.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Did they ever think to just ask me? I might not care much
| about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I
| might be interested in
|
| The most profitable ad categories are in things like insurance
| and legal. Who would opt in to those?
| rch wrote:
| If the top categories apply for most people by default, then
| there's no reason to have people opt-in or track them.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The general categories apply to everyone. The profitable
| subcategories are very specific, especially based on
| location and income.
| godshatter wrote:
| If people don't check the "legal" or "insurance" boxes, then
| they wouldn't be the most profitable any longer, something
| else would be. And it would be something people are
| proactively more interested in. Besides, if you're in a
| situation where you might need a lawyer or you might need a
| type of insurance, you might actually go check that box, even
| if you uncheck it again once you've found one.
| andrewjmg wrote:
| got a source on that claim?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The adsense niches which pay the most:
|
| https://alejandrorioja.com/high-cpc-adsense-keywords/
|
| You also see it in Google keyword prices:
|
| https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/most-expensive-
| keywords-g...
|
| The most profitable keywords are in industries where there
| is a high lifetime customer cost. Most of those are mundane
| because the less you think about it, the longer you stay as
| a customer.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| I would have said the more ambulance chasing legal
| queries and plumbers 15 years ago when I did a bit of
| AdWords plumbing keywords in London where PS45 to PS50
| quid
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| >> Adblocker detected! Please disable to enjoy my
| marketing guides.
|
| Sure...
| keenmaster wrote:
| >Who would opt-in to those?
|
| The OP's approach doesn't depend on people opting into legal
| ads. You can use ML/regressions/whatever to extrapolate the
| best people to show which type of legal ads based on their
| interests, even if those interests do not include "Legal".
| There doesn't even need to be an opt-out option at all. I
| don't think consumers would mind, since opt-outs reduce the
| service's advertising revenue which in turn increases the
| cost of the service. Almost no one wants to pay more money.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > You can use ML/regressions/whatever
|
| But do you not feed that with all sorts of data you
| aggregate about the user?
| keenmaster wrote:
| When a user volunteers granular data about their
| interests, you can use pre-existing correlates between
| those interests and purchasing probabilities. Those
| correlates can be derived from exogenous data generated
| from a subset of users with the same interests (who
| voluntarily accept more tracking for free premium
| features), experiments, educated estimates from experts,
| etc...
|
| The above approach might not be perfect, but I would
| compare it to the recent trend towards organic food.
| Organic food is simply costlier and less efficient to
| produce. Nonetheless, a growing number of people wouldn't
| do without it. They only visit stores with organic meat
| and produce. Websites that completely eschew tracking and
| third party tracker data can be the "Whole Foods" of
| websites.
| salawat wrote:
| >I don't think consumers would mind, since opt-outs reduce
| the service's advertising revenue which in turn increases
| the cost of the service. Almost no one wants to pay more
| money.
|
| Your natural learning just failed. Congratulations. Can't
| wait to see the Machine learned version you want to force
| on people completely unawares of what you're doing.
|
| Privacy bloody means something. Until you start respecting
| people's desire to be left well enough alone, and not have
| their attention imposed on by obnoxious advertising, all
| you are going to door ensure that the wave of sentiment
| against the practice grows more and more severe.
| keenmaster wrote:
| So we're not just anti-tracking now, but also completely
| anti-advertising? How else do you think free services
| will get the revenue they need? Do you think all of them
| will be able to survive solely on patron revenue and
| purchases? Some surely can, but you're making a universal
| argument here.
|
| Wherever advertising is necessary to keep a website
| running and up to date, being anti-advertising is akin to
| being anti-working to get your money or anti-walking to
| get to your destination.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| You can infer a lot about which sort of stories people read
| especially for news papers - and also their geo location.
|
| Basic ML clustering - its not perfect.
| bmuon wrote:
| I'm surprised there's so many comments here about demographic
| data while that's only a really basic view into current ad
| tech. Since the late 2000s ad networks have invested heavily in
| retargeting [1]. It's quite common that people end up in a
| vendor, add something to the cart and never finish the
| transaction. Retargeting attempts to catch behaviors like that
| and adjust to display the items that the user showed interest
| in. I haven't been in that industry in years, but in the 2020s
| I can only expect much more nuanced systems based on ML. And
| everything falls apart without being able to keep a history of
| what you do and who you are.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting
| eitland wrote:
| > Did they ever think to just ask me?
|
| In Google settings I can choose my interests.
|
| Of course Google knows better than me and would always
| completely disregard it, showing me ads for dating sites (most
| seemed unusually scammy) for 10 years after I married instead
| of showing ads for stuff I might need or be tempted to buy
| anyway:
|
| - car parts (unless I have recently bought everything I need
| like today)
|
| - computer/tech conferences
|
| - family holidays, toys etc
|
| Since Google only hires the best and brightest and let them
| work freely under the most inspiring conditions this must be a
| really great idea.
|
| For those who don't catch it: this is soaked in sarcasm.
|
| Edits: a bunch.
|
| Let me also add that while Google ads often has great ROI[0 ]
| you should keep an eye on them. Google has _annoyed me_ for ten
| years but I 'm close to claiming they must have _scammed_ a
| bunch of dating sites (or maybe just one company with a lot of
| fronts?)
|
| [0]: although possibly less than before according to friends
| who used them to bootstrap a nice company.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the day when advertisers realise
| they've been sinking millions and millions of dollars into a
| garbage industry. Think of all the industries tied up into
| advertising, and how basic ad-money is to keeping on the
| lights of the modern internet! Google, Facebook, YouTube,
| Twitter, it's all ad-money, where will it all go if the ad-
| money dries up?
| hiram112 wrote:
| There is a reason that Google, at least, is worth so much
| on the stock market.
|
| My mother is definitely not a tech savvy computer user, but
| she's learning. I've finally showed her how to do a few
| things 'online', including email and basic searching. She
| wanted to order flowers for a relative due to a family
| death recently. As I imagine that vast majority of the
| population is also trained to do, she went to Google, typed
| in "order flowers" and went to the very first site that
| Google showed her. And that flower site, of course, was an
| ad - though it has gotten harder and harder to notice these
| over the years.
|
| She ended up spending $30 with free shipping (down from $50
| after I showed her how to find 'online coupon'). Google
| probably made a nice percentage of this sale.
|
| Think of how many times that situation is repeated every
| day, all over the world.
|
| There's a reason Google can afford so many pointless
| 'diversity' managers, expensive research, projects that are
| canned after a few years, and tens of thousands of highly
| paid and pampered employees. They've practically got a
| printing press...
| resu_nimda wrote:
| "Flowers" is one of the most ad-heavy queries out there.
| When I worked at Yahoo it was commonly used as the
| example to show or test some ad displays. Even on Google
| now you see only ad content above the fold.
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Google has backup strategies and could pivot fast, not
| without shedding a lot of people.
|
| You're right, though - ad money is definitely providing bad
| incentives, but it also provides support for cooky
| projects. Marketing people also get to show their managers
| these nice graphs on ad spend "returns", that are complete
| lies.
|
| Twitter and Facebook are much more tied into ad money,
| though.
| eitland wrote:
| Facebook might be more tied to ad money and I dislike
| them even more than I dislike Google but they actually
| sometimes manages to show me relevant ads - and unlike
| their "bigger brother" most of the time without insulting
| me and my family badly in the process ;-)
| JAlexoid wrote:
| FYI: Google doesn't choose what's the best content for you -
| we're not there yet. The advertiser chooses to target you.
| Let alone - they are completely oblivious to your
| relationship status or you having kids.
| maxbond wrote:
| I share similar experiences. I routinely tell Google not to
| show me obnoxious dating ads, or ads for pornographic video
| games, etc. They tell me they won't show me a particular ad
| again, and then immediately show me an almost identical ad
| from the same company.
|
| On mobile YouTube, where I see most of my ads, it's also
| almost impossible to click the extra-tiny shishkabob menu
| next to the ad without first clicking the ad a bunch of
| times. Until ~6 months ago, this made the ad disappear, and
| made it impossible (or at least, I didn't see how) to request
| they not show you the ad. And now it looks like you engaged
| with it. I don't think this accidental clicks was necessarily
| their intention, but they certainly decided to make that
| shishkabob smaller than all the others, which was absolutely
| a deliberate dark pattern. Presumably to increase the effort
| required to/decrease the frequency of users taking this
| action.
|
| Now they've taken to pitching me pretty extreme propaganda
| from the likes of The Epoch Times.
|
| Best and brightest, indeed.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _Now they 've taken to pitching me pretty extreme
| propaganda from the likes of The Epoch Times._
|
| Seriously, why can't we say No Thanks to a company's ads
| and let them stop wasting our time and their money?
| xmcp123 wrote:
| They actually do that. It's not difficult at all to get
| banned from Tier 1 online ad networks.
| stinkyball wrote:
| How does one achieve this ?
| craftinator wrote:
| It's in Google's best interest to let the company pay
| them for showing you irrelevant ads.
| dorgo wrote:
| If all players would act rationlly then Google would have
| no incentive either way. If Google would show more
| (irrelevant) ads then the cost per click would be reduced
| and Google would get the same payout. But most
| advertisers are still people and because of this Google
| still has an incentive to show more ads.
| pb7 wrote:
| > I share similar experiences. I routinely tell Google not
| to show me obnoxious dating ads, or ads for pornographic
| video games, etc. They tell me they won't show me a
| particular ad again, and then immediately show me an almost
| identical ad from the same company.
|
| I mean, if that's all you search then...
| maxbond wrote:
| I have never searched for these things :)
|
| If I click the button to explain the ad, it tells me it's
| because of my age (I'm a young man) and time of day (I
| watch videos in the late evening.)
|
| Which is certainly a profile that makes sense, in broad
| strokes. But no, these are not my interests.
|
| (No judgement to people who like playing pornographic
| games and dating online! It's just rather inconvenient
| when I'm trying to watch YouTube videos with my family!)
| salawat wrote:
| >I mean, if that's all you search then...
|
| That's the absolute wrong way to look at it.
|
| There is no "you". There's a cookie/advertising ID. If
| you're going and constantly changing out; it's back to
| square one.
|
| It actually seems to be their base arrangement. Every
| time I 've blown away every cookie/tracker/reset my
| advertising ID, the ground state seems to be teenage to
| twenty something with a smattering of mortgage
| offers/weight loss/health tips/sexual dysfunction stuff
| that I assume is Google's equivalent of a fortune
| teller's cold reading in terms of trying to make a
| decision on which avenues to go down in order to further
| specialize.
|
| I actually messed around with it once to figure out what
| it would do with minimal prodding and more or less random
| clicks. Interestingly, the mortgage click didn't really
| change their estimate of my age (or they just think that
| every male on the internet is into 20 somethings).
| They've never done a good job in terms of picking up on
| themes except when I've looked up a bunch of enterprise
| software documentation while logged in on Chrome, or made
| travel reservations.
|
| Frankly; I find the entire process insulting in the sense
| that Google would likely respond "You're using our
| service wrong" rather than admit they've engaged in a
| decade long romp down digital stalker lane. If I wanted
| unsolicited buying advice, I'd ask for it.
|
| They're the new Clippy in my book. Every Ad reverberates
| with a mental _Tink Tink_ as the great data hoarding
| monolith known as Google does it 's damnedest to sell me
| something, coming off as an Alzheimer's patient in the
| process.
|
| And again, I resent the status quo being that "if I gave
| them more info, I'd see more relevant ads". I don't want
| your damn ads. I don't want my information in any form
| stored in your databases. Leave me alone! That includes
| in the statistical voyeurism sense too!
|
| This would be the single most impactful way to return the
| Net to a repository of valuable information.
|
| Kill the advertising incentive in the absence of opt-in.
|
| But how will websites stay up without advertising, you
| might ask?
|
| I don't care. I host things I _want_ out there. I find a
| way to account for it. If you want to present me first
| party ad like the DailyWTF did for years, I 'm okay with
| that. The third-party monetization model needs to stop
| though. All it encourages is bad behavior and ad revenue
| maximization techniques.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > There is no "you". There's a cookie/advertising ID. If
| you're going and constantly changing out; it's back to
| square one.
|
| Enough to just log in to Gmail or YouTube and you're
| back.
| [deleted]
| tilolebo wrote:
| I worked for 5 years for an ad network. We had a team of ML
| engineers working solely on improving the recommendations
| accuracy.
|
| There's one thing, though: no matter how good your
| recommendation algorithms are, if you only have shit to
| advertise, you'll only recommend shit.
| [deleted]
| maxbond wrote:
| "Best and brightest" was pretty glib, I'll admit.
|
| My problem is less that the recommendation engine isn't
| good enough than that this industry is too large and too
| powerful, and I believe that it's existence is dangerous
| to society.
|
| For instance, given the Snowden documents, I would give
| the odds that NSA isn't piggybacking on this private
| intelligence a very, very low value. How you feel about
| that is a function of your politics, but even if you
| think NSA is a good actor, it's not hard to imagine an
| intelligence agency you wouldn't appreciate gaining
| access to that information.
|
| But a more mundane and realistic concern is just Google
| being a monopolizer. The other day they "helpfully" opted
| me in to their new meeting service and "helpfully"
| inserted a meeting link into my calendar. This caused me
| to be 10 minutes late to a job interview over Zoom -
| because I'd spent 25 minutes waiting in an empty Google
| Meeting! I'd just assumed the client used this service.
| (Luckily, they were understanding.) My personal
| frustrations aside, IANAL but that seems like the very
| definition of a monopolizing tactic, and I'm pretty sure
| that's illegal. If I'm wrong, then I submit that it
| should be.
|
| It's not hard to imagine Google gaming the stock market,
| or to imagine malicious Googlers conducting insider
| trading. I'm sure the best and brightest could come up
| with more ingenious and more lucrative ways to abuse
| their position as well.
| naravara wrote:
| >Google has annoyed me for ten years but I'm close to
| claiming they must have scammed a bunch of dating sites (or
| maybe just one company with a lot of fronts?)
|
| I seem to remember an article a long time ago that pulled
| back the curtain on a lot of these niche dating sites.
| Apparently it's all basically just a single backend with a
| whole bunch of different front ends and they just use
| attributes to decide which niches you could potentially fall
| it. It has the effect of having lots of niches for people to
| sign up for, but a bigger user base in each one since they're
| basically pulling names out of a common dating pool.
|
| The example in the article was that there was one site
| specifically for dating farmers and one sight specifically
| for dating within some specific religious denomination. But
| if you identified your religion in the farmer ones people in
| the religious one would see your profile too and vice versa.
| And, of course, the whole thing was just lousy with bots and
| scammers.
|
| I read this article ages ago though. At least 6 or 7 years.
| I'd be surprised if that dynamic was still working.
| Jestar342 wrote:
| The last thread on HN regarding "smart" advertising (that I
| participated in) had a brilliant reply to my following
| anecdote:
|
| > I buy (electronic) gadgets all the time. Parts for PCs,
| Raspberry Pis, Arduino, "smart" devices to replace "dumb"
| devices like light bulbs, power sockets, equipment for
| race/flight simulation, etc. and adverts were usually just
| for the latest nVidia card or some games or something. Then
| there was that ONE TIME I bought a unicorn dress for my (then
| 2yo) daughter and that's it: Nothing but unicorn shit
| advertised at me for the rest of my life.
|
| and the reply was something like:
|
| > The fact that FAANG has spent what must be billions on
| specialised/targetted advertising and still can never show us
| adverts for anything other than stuff _we've already bought_
| reassures me that we'll not see intelligent targetted
| advertising in my lifetime.
|
| and I have to say I agree.
| dorgo wrote:
| >reassures me that we'll not see intelligent targetted
| advertising in my lifetime.
|
| The only thing which prevents this are incentives. Content
| provider are paid per click. Intelligent targeting would
| reduce clicks. Advertisers would have to pay more for
| intelligent targeting. So why not just keep the status quo?
| rhizome wrote:
| Recommendation engines do. not. work. If they can't figure
| out what you might like based on the articles you read on
| the New York frickin Times, 25,000 more data points about
| you aren't going to help.
| SilasX wrote:
| I remember on one of those threads, the defense was that
| the advertisers are able to say, "We showed this person an
| ad for X. S/he bought X." And no one looks too closely
| about what order it happened in.
| MagnumPIG wrote:
| Part of this inaccuracy is on purpose.
|
| People can really freak the fuck out when you can predict
| what they need accurately. For example the real case of a
| store advertising specific baby items to someone who didn't
| know she was pregnant.
|
| This is why "suggested items" often have one wildcard
| thrown in: They don't want you to realize just how much
| they really know you.
|
| Of course this doesn't explain failures, but I wouldn't
| rule out smart ads just yet.
| dchichkov wrote:
| Hmm. Maybe this story was simply marketing of "perfect"
| advertisement services? Or an outlier?
| JAlexoid wrote:
| I would have thought that HN readers would at least be
| somewhat tech savvy, but alas.
|
| Advertisement systems are way less advanced and much more
| stereotype driven, than privacy freaks care to
| acknowledge. Think of this - advertisers have less than
| 100ms to decide the best ad to show you... often multiple
| times per website. Do you really think that any ads are
| actually personalised?
|
| I remember having to differentiate between Bike Helmet
| for Barbie(a toy) and Barbie Bike Helmet(safety device
| for children)... Or the fact that if you let a learning
| algo run through the categories, they can place
| dildos(adult toys) right next to water guns(kids toys).
|
| There are services that target you with offers that are
| highly tailored*, but online ads are not one of those
| services.
|
| (Amazon's "You May also like", food delivery services
| suggestions, and similar things that can calculate for a
| long time)
| andrepd wrote:
| ?? 100ms? Why, is precomputing outlawed or anything and I
| didn't hear it? And "privacy freaks", really? I thought
| after Snowden the notion that only crazies care about
| privacy no longer flies as it did.
| rightbyte wrote:
| 100ms? I mean Google et al. can precompile a list to
| serve you. There is no need for a hurry.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| I remember reading that article too (about the pregnancy
| thing). I was blown away at the time, but seeing how much
| AI has progressed in the past decade yet how far away we
| still are from seeing that in practice, I must say I no
| longer believe it. I believe like all AI hype of the past
| decade, the achievements were embellished beyond the
| point of truthfulness. Perhaps they sent the ad to 100
| people, 20 of them pregnant and knowing it, 1 pregnant
| and not knowing it, and 79 not pregnant, and chose to
| only report the 1. Perhaps they just made up the story.
| Perhaps they just got lucky and by pure chance they got
| one prediction right, and have been trying for the past
| decade to recreate that magical moment. Remember Google
| Flu Trends? What ever did happen to it? Surely they
| didn't discontinue it because it was predicting flu too
| accurately.
| derefr wrote:
| I _wish_ this was true. I would love to be able to go to
| e.g. Amazon and just find something I didn 't know I
| wanted recommended to me on the front page. Instead, the
| only things on there are advertisements for Amazon Prime
| affiliate services; the list of things in my
| wishlist/saved items/recently browsed; and some
| objectively (i.e. un-customized) "hot" items in
| categories it knows I browse.
|
| Meanwhile, the thing I might want, if only I knew about
| it? It's not on the front page; it's not on the hot or
| new pages; and it's not anywhere near the first page of
| results for any search I do. These are SEO death-zones,
| where I just see 1000 optimized contenders for the one
| boring highest-profit-margin product.
|
| Instead, to find genuinely-interesting new products, I
| have to go into particular micro-categories, _and then_
| browse through ~20 pages of irrelevant same-y things to
| get past the micro-category 's own SEO death-zone. (Even
| within e.g. the "Scientific Instruments" category, the
| first ten pages are all either N95 masks or brewing
| equipment, rather than, y'know, beakers and test strips
| and CO2 monitoring equipment and such. I know _why_
| --they don't re-rank per the browsing habits of the other
| people who've viewed a given category, but instead reuse
| the item's global rank in all categories it appears in--
| but it's still ridiculous.)
|
| I mean, maybe I'm an outlier; I watch YouTube reviews of
| life-hack tools, kitchen gadgets, etc., so most
| "novelties" aren't all that novel to me. When I'm looking
| for "something I don't know about", I more mean
| "something that would excite me, but which _nobody_
| within my filter-bubble is excited about yet. "
|
| But surely an AI could deduce a ranking algorithm that
| would show people like me what they want to see, right? I
| feed it plenty of training data in terms of what I do and
| don't bookmark/save on the site. It just needs to think
| one level up from "tags" / "similar users."
|
| And the weird thing is, I feed _plenty_ of data on _exact
| products I 've been interested in in the past_ to every
| service I use. Like I said, I watch YouTube videos about
| e.g. knock-off portable game consoles; I search Google
| for those products, say things about them in Facebook
| Messenger, etc. I know I'm getting my privacy invaded by
| these services--the least they can do is to actually use
| that information to get me a "recommended" product
| listing for the thing I'm considering buying!
| tylerhou wrote:
| She knew she was pregnant, and had made purchasing
| decisions based on that. Her father did not, and called
| Target when the house received ads for baby-related items
| (cribs/diapers).
| elliekelly wrote:
| I haven't had Facebook for a few years now but taking a
| look at the advertising section is what finally made me
| delete my account. One of my interests, according to
| Facebook, was pants. This was especially odd because I wear
| dresses and skirts far more often than I wear pants.
|
| Some time later I was in my closet and still pondering how
| Facebook could possibly be so wrong as to think I was
| interested in pants of all things. On a whim, I decided to
| count my pants. And you know what? I had a _lot_ of pants.
| Triple digits. Way more pants than I realized I had and way
| more pants than any one person could possibly need. It
| turns out, I _was_ pretty interested in pants.
|
| Facebook, without ever having seen my closet, had a better
| understanding of my wardrobe than I did.
| eitland wrote:
| For what it is worth, it is my opinion that Facebook
| (that I dislike more than Google) serves me much more
| relevant ads.
|
| I've even bought a few things I found through Facebook or
| Instagram ads, things that I wasn't aware of and that I
| enjoy, timeular and old school safety razors for example,
| proving that advertising _can_ be a win-win game.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| I get this impression as well: again completely
| anecdotal, but FB is the only advertising that I've
| actually heard friends actually talk about approvingly
| (as in, it offered them things they found they wanted).
| Which I find slightly bizarre: I've never really ever
| heard anyone talking about advertising approvingly. As
| I'm writing this, my partner has just walked into the
| room and is debating whether to order ice cream on
| delivery due to being shown a targeted advert on
| Instagram. Something seems to be working, anyway
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| anoraca wrote:
| They buy all of your credit card data.
| rhizome wrote:
| That isn't itemized. It'll tell them how much you use a
| credit card, and where, but that's it.
|
| No, what they do is buy point-of-sale data from stores,
| often through companies like Nielsen and larger. _NOW_
| they know what you 're buying, and Banana Republic ain't
| gonna stop telling them, because the market research
| aggregators pay them back by telling them who is buying
| their stuff, like people whose credit card usage is 45%
| directed at clothing stores.
| nkozyra wrote:
| I'm not sure that would allow you to glean specific types
| of clothing, unless the purchases were at Pants R Us or
| The Pansatorium
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| You are assuming it is Visa or MasterCard selling
| transaction information but that seems unlikely (beyond
| aggregate, non-identifiable data).
|
| It's far more likely that the Gap is uploading your
| itemized receipt data to advertising networks (complete
| w/ that email address they always ask you for and your CC
| info) under the guise of improving their own retargeting.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| You have hundreds of pants and you just kinda forgot
| about it? That's like several wardrobes filled with
| pants. Do you have a separate apartment just for your
| clothes?
| elliekelly wrote:
| I don't really have a good excuse other than I enjoy
| fashion. Women's pants take up less space than you'd
| imagine. I had a walk-in closet and my pants took up a
| section about equal to a normal sized hall closet. I
| hadn't forgotten about them I just didn't realize how
| many I had. I've since re-homed the vast majority of my
| admittedly excessive wardrobe in order to live out of a
| suitcase. Expensive clothing was one of the many ways I
| felt I was trapped in the rat race.
| NoodleIncident wrote:
| I think that technically, Google and Facebook aren't to blame
| for these ads. They can slap as many labels on their users as
| they want, but it's up to the advertiser (at least on
| facebook) whether they want to target based on those
| categories and interests, or if they just use the default
| 18-35 (male) targeting that they think will work better. One
| of the reasons I started blocking ads on youtube was the
| unskippable horror movie ads; I can imagine that it would be
| hard to narrow down "interest in horror movies" from your
| internet data, so they just target everyone, no matter how
| much I adjusted my advertising interests.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| It's the invisible hand of the market. If it was wrong it
| would be inefficient and change so it must be right and
| you're wrong!
|
| My towel is also damp if you can't tell
| christophilus wrote:
| I can't think of the last relevant online advertisement I've
| seen. They're almost always out of context and uninteresting.
| On the other hand, magazine ads are usually well-fitted to the
| topics in the magazine, and I find I often read them.
|
| The point is, I'm not really convinced that tracking is
| necessary in order to produce more relevant ads. I guess it's
| kinda necessary in order to track how many views an ad gets,
| but there's gotta be a better way to do that, and it doesn't
| need to collect any data other than "viewed++" or maybe a bit
| more to prevent gaming the system.
| topkai22 wrote:
| Go into the market for a mildly big ticket item other than a
| house and do some searches or browse some websites with
| privacy blockers off. You'll get start getting "relevant"
| ads.
|
| I went to a e-bike manufacturer's website a couple months ago
| and they chased me around the internet with ads for like a
| week.
| eitland wrote:
| I'm in the market for a bigger house. Schibsted knows.
| Google still seems to have no idea.
| Veen wrote:
| For me, this more often presents as ubiquitous ads for
| something I have already bought.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| Even more so on amazon
|
| "yes Amazon I have just brought that TTRPG supplement why
| would I want to buy it again"
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| For some ads, i think google, you can click/tap on that
| blue little X to close it. Then a clickable field
| appears, and when you click, or tap on you can choose "I
| already bought this" among the reasons for why you closed
| that ad.
|
| Question is if one is willing to do that, or not. I
| prefer blocking them.
| mopsi wrote:
| I once googled airport tow tractors to see what their specs
| were. Saw ads of airport equipment for months after... I'm
| nowhere near buying a 16-ton tug to move airliners around.
| zentiggr wrote:
| That would make for an awesome "saw a coupon, this is
| what they shipped!" story. Probably good resale to an
| FBO.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I haven't worked in online advertising for a long time now,
| but when I did it was in the early days of retargeting, and
| the startup I was at was pivoting to doing search
| retargeting. But honestly, without any real metrics to
| justify it -- I suspect just investor interest / industry
| buzz.
|
| I ran some quick numbers myself to see how the early
| experiments with it were doing, in regards to click through
| rates, and I didn't see any statistically significant
| improvements. I became very very skeptical -- one of the many
| things that led to me having a large fallout with the
| founder.
|
| Now I'm sure in the intervening decade there's been
| improvements, and this is just one anecdotal datapoint, so I
| can't make strong claims about the efficacy of retargeting
| generally -- but I remain skeptical.
| hinkley wrote:
| I love it when they spam you with big ticket purchase ads
| right after you have made a purchase.
|
| Yeah I'm full up on computers/cars/kayaks/trailers/riding
| lawnmowers right now, thanks.
|
| Maybe sell me monitors or printers instead, or wait a month
| and show me fancy kayak paddles, GoPro, or roof rack mounts
| that save my back.
| craftinator wrote:
| I think the base cause of this is that we look for products
| based on life events; if the light burns out, we search for a
| new lightbulb. Google can't have this data (thank Dog), so
| can only serve targeted ads based on recent internet
| activity. Thinking of this in terms of PID loops, there's too
| much external interference, and too much lag in the loop for
| it to be really effective in calculating the next derivative.
| Spivak wrote:
| I honestly just kinda want an "ad shopping site" to discover
| new brands. Like let me post a description of an item I'm
| looking to purchase and then companies reach out to me with
| what they've got.
| wastedhours wrote:
| I started building such a thing - the problem is the same for
| any marketplace startup, it's really hard to get enough
| people on either side to scale.
| Guest0918231 wrote:
| How would this be different than going to Amazon.com and
| searching for "bluetooth speaker" or "marble chess site" and
| seeing offers from different companies for products you can
| buy? Amazon also makes it convenient since you can order
| through their site instead of being redirected to a third-
| party, and they assist in the shipping/return process.
| kaybe wrote:
| I want content-sensitive non-tracking ads.
|
| Like, I'm reading cooking recipes and might actually be
| really interested in this fancy cooking equipment or
| specialized book on the topic.
|
| Just don't tell me about that when I'm thinking coding and
| clutter up my thoughts.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I have never heard a satisfactory explanation for why this
| isn't what's done. When I'm reading about lawyers I might
| be looking for lawyers, when I'm reading about rolling pins
| I probably want a rolling pin.
|
| Three weeks later I've hired a lawyer and bought a rolling
| pin and I don't need those ads anymore, they are perhaps
| the least profitable ads to show me.
| ravenstine wrote:
| > Did they ever think to just ask me?
|
| I've wondered this for years, but I think I know why they don't
| do this.
|
| If they asked me what ads I'd be interested in seeing, and were
| to abide by my exact parameters, that would limit how many ads
| they can show me and hence how much money they can make.
|
| Instead, they spend billions to make guesses on what to show
| me, not just to show me what I want to see, but to make guesses
| on what I _don 't know_ that I want to see, opening up the door
| to showing me many more ads and make more money. That and they
| know that even ads for things I'm not interested in at the
| moment can persuade me to buy in the future.
|
| Of course, I'm not saying that any of their methods are
| actually very effective. Whenever I've turned uBlock Origin
| off, or saw ads on Hulu, I don't remember ever seeing something
| that's even remotely interesting to me or got me to engage.
| Like a lot of things such as "AI", I believe that modern
| advertising is a lot of overvalued bunk that mostly has value
| on the perception that it's necessary. It survives because
| people in charge don't actually understand the technicalities
| behind advertising, except that its use _seems_ necessary and
| correlates with continued cash flow.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > that mostly has value on the perception that it's necessary
|
| This is known as the Amazon vacuum problem. Try buying a
| vacuum and your suggestions will be about vacuums forever!
| renewiltord wrote:
| The best time to show you vacuum ads is right after you buy
| a vacuum because:
|
| * You have concrete intent
|
| * At a 5% return rate (pretty low), that's 5% you're going
| to buy the alternative
| eitland wrote:
| I hear that that explanation a lot.
|
| I'm not sure I buy it.
|
| As for why:
|
| 1. I don't have much data except myself but I can't
| remember buying from those ads.
|
| I can remember smiling at them a lot though.
|
| 2. That wouldn't explain why I get ads for the exact same
| product I bought.
|
| Here's another argument I remember from marketing at
| engineering school:
|
| Some marketing is justified even after the customer has
| bought -especially with expensive items - to make them
| feel like they did the right thing (which in turn should
| make them less likely to return it.)
| dorgo wrote:
| That's the problem with advertisement. It's ok to annoy
| 95% to sell to 5%.
| brianpan wrote:
| Just look at polling and you'll see why "just ask me" is not
| as simple as it seems.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >I've wondered this for years, but I think I know why they
| don't do this.
|
| In similar vein, why not just advertise based on the content
| the person is currently consuming? Put fishing ads into an
| article about fishing, the same way people put gun ads into
| gun magazines.
|
| Given how abysmal targetted advertising is I don't see this
| being much worse.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> In similar vein, why not just advertise based on the
| content the person is currently consuming?
|
| Why not advertise based on what they consumed last week
| too? And once you start down that path it's like the
| Netflix recommendation problem. Also, at scale one Hope's
| they refine the algorithms based on actual CTR feedback.
| mhb wrote:
| _the Netflix recommendation problem_
|
| Maybe you're thinking of how it is now, but when Netflix
| had its sophisticated Cinematch, its recommendations were
| much, much better.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Why not advertise based on what they consumed last week
| too? And once you start down that path it's like the
| Netflix recommendation problem
|
| from my personal experience because it takes a way too
| static view of my consumption habits. Echoing some other
| replies here I find these personal recommender systems to
| be completely awful.
|
| They constantly recommend me stuff I've already bought or
| have no interest in any more, and Netflix constantly
| overfits what I like, vastly underestimating genres I
| haven't seen yet while recommending me awful shows
| presumably just because they fall into some sort of
| similar buckets to higher quality shows I've watched.
|
| Case in point, the NYT already got rid of behavioural
| targetting in Europe last year and actually saw ad-
| revenue go up. (https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-
| be-creepy/)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Because people spend lots of time on things they won't buy.
| Contextual advertising is available. It's just not as high-
| performing, in general. Works for search, for instance. Ask
| your marketing team.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| If they ask you, you will tend to answer with what you
| perceive a better version of yourself _should_ want. But they
| don 't care about that imaginary version of yourself. They
| care about what gets you angry enough to click/share.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I've looked into this, since I think there's a massive
| amount of value being left on the table due to this
| disconnect. The standard answer is essentially what you're
| saying, combined with the fact that some advertisers are
| willing to pay more. A business that sells ad space is
| going to sell it as expensively as possible, so they don't
| want the highest bidder to know they're not on my 'approved
| subjects' list.
|
| A trick I think they're missing though is that I'm a lot
| more likely to pay for things a better version of myself
| should want, even more so if I've essentially asked my
| advertisers to nag me about it. The potential conversion
| rates are so much higher that I think any network which
| gets this right is set to blow the competition out of the
| water.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| A thought occurred to me that those companies are
| actively fighting against your attempts to improve
| yourself.
| btilly wrote:
| If the potential conversion rates are indeed higher, then
| that would have shown up on A/B tests.
|
| The basic advertising infrastructure has been A/B tested
| to death. And one of the biggest takeaways that is that
| what people think that they respond to is not what they
| actually will respond to. One of the next biggest is that
| people who actually have responded are often completely
| unaware of what it is that they are responding to.
|
| The underlying reason is simple. A/B testing is very good
| at teasing out what we respond to before we consciously
| notice that we are responding. But since that happens
| before we are conscious of it, we lack awareness of what
| caused that.
|
| But the simple fact remains. If you think that
| advertising would work better if they just did things the
| way that you think that they should, you are almost
| certainly wrong.
| bootlooped wrote:
| Wouldn't it follow then that you would also buy things that
| you think that better version of yourself would want? Or is
| it that people want to be that better version without
| actually doing anything about it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, if you've got uBlock Origin on most of the time there's
| no information on you. Obviously you get the untargeted ad.
| Essentially no one but the broad audience guys are buying
| your attention.
| ravenstine wrote:
| They didn't seem to target me well before I started
| blocking ads, or when I used Facebook where uBlock Origin
| doesn't work and where I pretty much voluntarily told them
| everything about me before I wised up. But your point is
| well taken.
| dorgo wrote:
| I don't know. Amazon knows exactly what I bought over the
| years (ublock or no ublock) and still tries to sell the
| same or weird stuff to me, or recomends the same books I
| already bought. I think advertisers just don't care.
| catalogia wrote:
| Amazon's "also bought" recommendations are usually pretty
| good in my experience. e.g. _" people who bought
| replacement roomba filters also bought replacement roomba
| brushes"_ _Usually_ I find these recommendations fairly
| sensible.
| wpietri wrote:
| > Did they ever think to just ask me?
|
| I think you misunderstand who the customer is here. What you
| want is irrelevant. It's what they can get you to pay for.
|
| If you knew what you wanted, you could just type that into a
| search box. Clearly, the NYT display ads have other purposes.
| Looking at the home page now, the ones I see are to spark
| feelings of need and suggest a solution at the same time.
| Skipping right over the part where I think about needing
| something and figure out the best way to solve that need.
| godshatter wrote:
| If I'm paying for a subscription, then I am the customer,
| theoretically anyway. Which is why I wish they would take a
| subscriber-centered approach. If they sent me ads I indicated
| I wanted to see, then I should be more willing to click on
| them then some ad trying to indicate how much I really need a
| left-handed blivet in my life even though I've never
| indicated any interest in such an item. It seems like it
| would bring higher click-through numbers for a lot less work.
| Companies selling left-handed blivets might be hurt, but
| that's not my concern. But then I don't understand anything
| about the current system, admittedly. I do everything I can
| to avoid it.
|
| I am not actually a subscriber though, but I think I might
| become one for at least a while after this is in place just
| to try to reward companies moving in this direction. It would
| be refreshing to be able to go to a news site and not have
| noscript show dozens of domains in it's list.
| munchbunny wrote:
| "Audience segments" is a pretty general term for... well,
| segmenting their readership so that advertisers can target
| specific groups. They could be doing this based on what
| articles you read, your geographical location, or whatever else
| it is, including possibly just asking you. It doesn't say much
| about the degree of kosher they will abide by.
|
| That said, removing 3rd party data is a big deal, because 3rd
| party data is consistently one of the worst offenders but also
| one of the simpler ways to make your advertising slots more
| valuable.
|
| At face value, it means:
|
| 1. They are _not_ buying /using data gathered about you from
| elsewhere by other companies and other websites.
|
| 2. They _are_ still directly analyzing data they gather about
| you from sites owned by NYT.
|
| 3. They _could_ still use data gathered from sites affiliated
| with NYT using NYT trackers, if that 's something NYT does. No
| idea if NYT does it.
| troydavis wrote:
| > 3. They could still use data gathered from sites affiliated
| with NYT using NYT trackers, if that's something NYT does. No
| idea if NYT does it.
|
| NYT seems to do this with sites they own like The Wirecutter.
| Even privacy preferences are controlled by shared
| infrastructure. For example, thewirecutter.com uses
| https://purr.nytimes.com/v1/directives, which serves this
| JSON. Presumably the values depend on which regulations
| you're covered by: {
| "PURR_AcceptableTrackers": {"value":"controllers"},
| "PURR_AcceptableTrackers_v2":
| {"value":"processors"}, "PURR_AdConfiguration":
| {"value":"full"}, "PURR_AdConfiguration_v2":
| {"value":"rdp"}, "PURR_CaliforniaNoticesUI":
| {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataProcessingConsentUI":
| {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataProcessingPreferenceUI":
| {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataSaleOptOutUI":
| {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataSaleOptOutUI_v2":
| {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_EmailMarketingOptInUI":
| {"value":"checked"} }
| munchbunny wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. It's interesting to see how they're
| implementing it.
|
| From the perspective of GDPR at least, I'm pretty sure NYT
| and its owned sites count as one controller/processor, and
| I think passes the sniff test for case #2 rather than case
| #3.
| asdff wrote:
| Some company trialed this (maybe it was hulu) and the results
| were astoundingly stupid. They had maybe 18 ads and three
| categories, you picked a category and got your six ads repeated
| infinitely.
| [deleted]
| Iv wrote:
| You are not the target. Who do you think clicks on "10 hot
| girls want to see you NOW! click here!" or "Item you bought 6
| month ago is now at a 50% sale!"
|
| I know some of the people who are the target. People who would
| buy 3 lifetime supplies of coffee because of a 20% sale. People
| who can't pass something framed as an exceptional offer. And of
| course, they are in debts.
|
| Fuck advertisement. It is preying on vulnerable people, it is
| making markets less efficient (by distorting information and
| urging consumers to not act rationally). Forbid this scam. Fund
| internet service in a saner way.
| andreareina wrote:
| If they're avoiding all third-party data, can they do better
| than user-submitted preferences plus observed behavior on the
| domain? It seems like anything else should count as third-
| party.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| Probably trying to combine data across all their online
| properties YouTube and pinterest and so on.
| not2b wrote:
| With 6 million subscribers, just looking at which articles
| people read gives a pretty good indication of what they are
| interested in. They don't need to do better.
| xmcp123 wrote:
| They did. Do you remember back in the day, when you signed up
| for yahoo and it asked you for all the things you were
| "Interested In"? That's what that was. It didn't work well. It
| turns out most people don't answer, and the ones that do lie.
|
| Even if that weren't true interests change and you'd never
| update a profile like that, and the most profitable things to
| advertise for you'd never put on it in the first place even if
| you remembered.
|
| Even if _that_ weren 't true, the people that would would make
| the most money would be the people who got to you before you
| got around to updating it.
|
| As context: I'm 32 years old now. I've been advertising online
| since I was 15.
| troydavis wrote:
| Many of the audience segments aren't interests, they're
| demographic and psychographic information. Per the excerpt
| below, would you willingly provide investable assets (ie, net
| worth), marital status, level of education, or family size?
|
| If not, presumably the "large team specifically to support this
| year of a dozen people" that NYT assembled has built a system
| to infer those things about you.
|
| This is NYT trying to stay competitive in light of CCPA (which
| state will adopt it next? my guesses are NY, OR, MA, or WA) and
| GDPR. First-party audience segmentation is now all but required
| for larger publishers.
|
| From the article:
|
| > Those segments are broken up into 6 categories: age (age
| ranges, generation), income (HHI, investable assets, etc.),
| business (level, industry, retirement, etc.), demo (gender,
| education, marital status, etc.) and interest (fashion, etc.)
| [deleted]
| manigandham wrote:
| Your actions show your interests more accurately than asking
| you. Also interests are too wide and can change over time.
| What's more important is what you're looking for right now and
| the recent actions you've taken (like reading about electric
| cars or looking at new shoes, even if you're interested in
| tech).
| zpeti wrote:
| I would be super interested in how this actually impacts their
| revenue from ads. How much more does a publisher make from
| sharing data with 3rd parties? 30%? 50%? 100%?
| aggronn wrote:
| The most common case of "Sharing data with 3rd parties" is when
| the first party uses their targeting platform (usually DFP/GAM)
| to serve a campaign to an advertiser looking for a specific
| audience. For example, NYT might sell a campaign targeted
| towards young people, and therefore would allocate inventory on
| their tech articles to that campaign. The advertiser or their
| DMP/DSP now serves content from _their first party domain_,
| allowing them to cookie the user. This gives them an
| opportunity to say "NYT said this user was in their 20s", which
| they can store in that cookie's profile, and later they can see
| that cookie when they're bidding for that user in a
| programmatic, non-direct setting. They can target the same user
| again, later, for cheaper than NYT direct pricing.
|
| Its talked about as "selling data", but its important to
| understand how that works, because its inherent to the value
| proposition of digital advertising. Its not "we have X data, do
| you want to buy it for $Y?". Its not about exporting CSVs or
| connecting data warehouses. Its "We have X data, do you want to
| buy inventory for that audience?". So the only way that a
| publisher can really sell ads without "selling data" is to do
| it on a non-targeted basis, so either through programmatic,
| non-direct, or through non-targeted direct campaigns. In
| isolation, a publisher who is selling non-targeted direct
| campaigns is not going to do well. Its just not a competitive
| offering to advertisers, unless the site's entire audience
| falls in a certain demographic--in which case, advertisers will
| just mark those users as having that characteristic, so in the
| end its still "selling data".
|
| One way to look at the value of selling first party data is to
| look at the gap between programmatic and direct sold inventory.
| Direct campaigns in the US typically go for $10-50 CPMs (highly
| dependent on the audience, context, and units). Programmatic
| averages closer to $1-2. So having first party data _and scale_
| can get you a 10-20X over not having data (and scale).
| shostack wrote:
| Found the industry person.
|
| Fully agree with this. Data leakage is also a real thing in
| RTB given the nature of the bid response if a pub wants any
| sort of decent CPMs/fill.
|
| Bringing this all 1st party and essentially creating their
| own walled data garden boosts the value of the exclusive 1st
| party data for some presumably valuable audience segments,
| arms their direct and PMP sales efforts with even more
| exclusivity, and prepares them for the post-cookie world once
| the Chrome update hits, which only really works for
| publishers that can get high %'s of logged-in users to match
| to audience segments and build their models around.
|
| This also handily lets them reduce/eliminate privacy
| legislation risk since presumably subscribers need to consent
| to all of this collection and usage for the service (nuances
| of how "ok" that is in the eyes of the various privacy bodies
| not withstanding).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The _New York Times_ did something similar in Europe last year,
| and saw revenues increase [1]. A lot of ad tech is snake oil.
|
| [1] https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-
| cut...
| gowld wrote:
| This is about ceasing of taking data from 3rd parties, not
| ceasing sending data to 3rd party aggregators.
|
| NYT will still be indirectly sending data to 3rd parties, via
| user-targeted ad placements.
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| as the New York times not one of the first adopting google AMP
| platform?
| trts wrote:
| Baseless but I wonder if this will be a longer strategy to become
| a 3rd-party advertiser themselves.
| code4tee wrote:
| In articles NYT reporters have often shamed their own site for
| the number of 3rd party trackers the site uses.
|
| I'm guessing a combination of that reporting, a general public
| shift against this sort of thing, along with serious questions
| about just how valuable all this tracking data really is led to
| this decision.
| marban wrote:
| Regardless of how & where the NYT tracks me -- what really pisses
| me off is that i still have to use an ad blocker as a fully
| paying customer to hide all those Rolex and one-more-upgrade ads.
| hoten wrote:
| I wonder if this is connected to Chrome's recent announcement of
| blocking heavy ads.
|
| https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/resource-heavy-ads-in-chro...
| Iv wrote:
| I wonder if GDPR played a role as well.
| shostack wrote:
| Likely more related to several trends including the
| announcement about Chrome getting rid of cookies in a couple
| years, increased privacy legislation and risk, and desire to
| extricate themselves from a low-leverage relationship with big
| platforms like Google and Facebook.
|
| This also likely dovetails with a bet around improved UX
| leading to subscription growth, which is a much healthier
| business model for them that better aligns them with their
| readers.
|
| I see other publishers looking to go this route in the future
| if they can pull it off. Particularly privacy-focused ones that
| have mechanisms for aggregating 1st party data and turning it
| into valuable targeting segments.
| jatinshah wrote:
| It's a great decision and glad they did it.
|
| But subscription revenue is now a much bigger part of NYT's
| overall revenue and ad tech CPMs are declining year over year. So
| it's not a hard decision anymore.
| look_lookatme wrote:
| They are still going to collect data about you and sell it to
| third parties.
| mc32 wrote:
| If true this may have further tack on good effects like fewer
| click bait headlines and fewer errors in reporting with less
| pressure to get things out before details emerge.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| These things aren't inentionally done to generate click
| revenue at any major outlet.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Sure...
| wpietri wrote:
| [citation needed]
| michaelt wrote:
| That's a bit no-true-scotsman isn't it?
|
| People are bitching about 'clickbait headlines' on the
| Easyjet hack post right now - and that's an article from
| the BBC.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| There's hardly any other reason to do it. Blowing your
| credibility like this hurts subscription revenue, so the
| only goal must be boosting your drive-by revenue (i.e. ad
| impressions).
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| "Clickbait" used to mean "Ten Reasons Clickbait isn't what it
| used to be... Number 8 will surprise you"!
|
| Nowadays, people seem to complain about any headline that in
| any way has the potential to make people want to read the
| article.
|
| From my anecdotal experience with editors at better
| publications (such as the NYT), they care _far less_ about
| individual articles ' metrics than people seem to believe.
|
| At many of these publications, writers do not even have
| access to read metrics. (Bloomberg is the example I'm sure
| of, but there are others)
| wpietri wrote:
| If the title is written in a way that withholds key
| information when it could just as well be included, I'm
| willing to call that clickbait. A headline alone shouldn't
| make me want to read the article. From my perspective, the
| headline's job is to let me know whether the contents are
| valuable enough to me that I want to read the article.
| mc32 wrote:
| Clickbait and linkbait were new SEO tools in the late
| aughts.
|
| Before the advent of this, most headlines tried to be
| relevant though with occasional good puns and pizazz.
|
| But mostly The Enquirer and the Daily News were outliers
| and made fun of for their routine exaggerations.
| ramblenode wrote:
| > "Clickbait" used to mean "Ten Reasons Clickbait isn't
| what it used to be... Number 8 will surprise you"!
|
| I think the definition has expanded at the same time that
| the clickthrough/SEO/likes/dopamine optimization has become
| embraced by _editors_ , who write the headlines. To me,
| clickbait is more about substance than style. It's an
| attentional lure into an article with disappointing
| substance, to varying extents. Various editors will stylize
| the headline for the sweet tooth of their demographic.
| notatoad wrote:
| >writers do not even have access to read metrics
|
| do the writers get to write the headlines though? i thought
| that was the editor's job, who surely does have access to
| the metrics.
| nightfly wrote:
| Headlines used to include the most important information,
| and the text for a link for the article would be the
| headline or something similarly descriptive. Nowadays links
| to articles often explicitly exclude information forcing
| you to the article to even see what it's about.
| brosirmandude wrote:
| A lot of people saying that this decision is because of
| adblockers, third party scripts, and future laws but...what if
| they just don't need third party ads anymore?
|
| They've likely been collecting reader data for awhile and are
| probably at the point where they can spin up their own internal
| ad service.
|
| Good example piece:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/01/upshot/are-yo...
| mikemotherwell wrote:
| For a site like the NY Times, pricing the ad space based on a
| user's historical data is a mug's game. NY Times has a
| reputation and value beyond the value of a user's browser
| history. Why would they want to compete with small nothing
| sites, giving a large percentage to adtech companies, when they
| can sell the premium service of being associated with the NY
| Times?
|
| "We are the NY Times. If you want to advertise on our site you
| have to pay a premium."
|
| "But we want to target ..."
|
| "We are the NY Times. We have half a billion ARR. Take it or
| leave it."
|
| That used to be how ads worked, and I think it is a better
| model - for both sides in many cases.
| padseeker wrote:
| Building your own ad network might be a lot of work, but it means
| you don't have to fight with ad blockers anymore. And newspapers
| only have 2 avenues for revenue - subscriptions and ad revenue.
| You have to give some content away as promotion, but if you have
| an ad blocker you as a consumer of news are nothing more than a
| leach. It costs money to write, edit, and deliver content.
| Otherwise you start serving up clickbait.
|
| I used to work for the Chicago Tribune. We put in a lot of time
| to make our website deliver quickly. The 3rd party advert
| networks were the biggest drag on the site. They vary greatly in
| their reputation. I hope it works. Maybe they'll open source it
| and share it with other newspapers that deliver quality content.
| dvduval wrote:
| I want to have a right to know how much money was paid for my
| clicks and views. At the very least, I should have access to all
| data regarding my clicks and views and have the right to ask that
| to be removed completely or for a date range.
| lee wrote:
| That's kind of tricky, because wouldn't that expose business
| data to competitors?
|
| I'm not sure we're entitled to that right as a user. The NYT is
| providing us content in exchange for analytics on how we use
| their site or respond to their advertising. As a user we're
| free to not buy what they're selling.
| dvduval wrote:
| This is a long way from Nielsen ratings were they called
| viewers. If my personal activity is being tracked, by
| definition that is personal and I should have a right to know
| what personal information is being tracked. In exchange for
| that information I can make a decision about my viewing
| habits.
| lee wrote:
| You're right, this is a long way from Nielsen ratings.
| Online media is definitely not cable.
|
| What the NYT is offering is no different than what Facebook
| or Google is offering. You're paying with your personal
| information to consume their service. If you don't like the
| terms, then you're free to simply not use their service. I
| believe that's fair.
|
| Why are we entitled otherwise?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > "This can only work because we have 6 million subscribers and
| millions more registered users that we can identify and because
| we have a breadth of content," says Allison Murphy, Senior Vice
| President of Ad Innovation.
|
| This doesn't actually change the story that non-major media
| players can't compete without the targeted ad ecosystem. Even NYT
| only might be able to pull this off. And if it's borderline for
| the NYTimes, there's a 0% chance a local newspaper could survive
| without the CPMs from targeted ads.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Smart. They're a big enough institution to run that stuff in-
| house.
|
| True, without tracking signal on third-party sites they won't
| know if their readers for stories on the Florida fishing industry
| are also car aficionados, but I don't know that they care for
| their use case.
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| The NYT frustrates me, as I am still forced to see 3rd party ads
| even after becoming a paying subscriber. There's no option to go
| ad-free.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I have the same gripe about the FT (at least in their app).
| asdff wrote:
| When I subscribed to LA times they just replaced their
| nonsubscriber banner ad with a 'taste of LA for subscribers
| only' banner ad. Didn't hesitate and just blocked the element.
| romanows wrote:
| I canceled my subscription due to their insistence on ads at
| any level of support (I asked their customer service about it).
| Stuck with the Washington Post which seems to be okay with
| charging more and displaying zero ads.
| codydh wrote:
| Was this an additional option or higher subscription? I
| currently have a Washington Post subscription and, with my ad
| blocker disabled, see plenty of ads.
| callahad wrote:
| In the EU, there's a WaPo subscription level that
| explicitly touts "no on-site advertising or third-party ad
| tracking" as a benefit: https://imgur.com/yWPXBYe
| romanows wrote:
| Oh, sorry, this is all on the respective Android apps. On
| the NYT app, there were ads inserted between some
| paragraphs of the articles.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| I've found their ad targeting to be laughably bad, even with
| 3rd party data. It's mostly ads for things that I have no
| interest in -- I don't give a flying fuck about golf, but saw a
| barrage of ads over a couple weeks for golf clubs.
| tehjoker wrote:
| What's interesting to me is that in Noam Chomsky's Propaganda
| Model, one of the factors that make corporate media like the
| NYT the voice of the state and large corporations is their need
| for advertising dollars. If they even slightly flinch in their
| editorial line, the ad dollars go elsewhere, which Chomsky
| documented.
|
| I was about to say that the reason there's no ad free option is
| that advertising so dominates subscriber fees, the correct way
| to look at this is that they are selling audiences to other
| large corporations rather than in some sense serving their
| readers. However, their 2020 financial report shows that
| subscriber revenues have recently eclipsed their advertising
| revenue starting in 2015.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/projects/2020-report/index.html
|
| The subscriber revenue was about a third larger than the ad
| revenue then. This is kind of an interesting difference. If the
| advertising revenue keeps dwindling, the editorial line will
| become more responsive to their subscribers rather than their
| advertisers. Of course, the subscriber base is going to be
| mainly middle to upper class and college educated, and those
| people believe many of the same things the corporations
| believe. However, I would hope that this would make the NYT
| marginally more populist and pro-worker and less oriented
| towards invading other countries which they currently nearly
| always support uncritically. I don't think there's any hope for
| them going further than that, but prying the cold dead fingers
| of the business community off the editorial line of the
| nation's paper of record would open a crack in the door.
| catalogia wrote:
| Their ad revenue might actually go up after switching to
| first-party ads, since those ads will probably be blocked
| less often than third party ads. Personally at least, 1st
| party ads are the only ones that ever slip through my ad
| blockers, and I rarely bother to block them myself.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I think this is probably the reason they're switching to
| 1st party ads. The ad revenue in 2015 was still very
| substantial. They won't want to give that up without a
| fight.
| ISL wrote:
| This has been true since approximately the beginning of
| newspaper-time.
|
| How much more would you be willing to pay to go entirely ad-
| free?
|
| From the NYT annual report [1], it appears that they made ~$1B
| in subscription revenue and $0.5B in advertising revenue last
| year. If you're willing to pay >50% more (if you can afford
| more, you're probably more valuable as an advertising target),
| NYT is probably interested.
|
| [1]
| https://s1.q4cdn.com/156149269/files/doc_financials/annual/2...
| alienreborn wrote:
| Print ads are so much better than online ads though. - Print
| ads generally don't break reading lines as most of them are
| generally between articles or between pages - Print ads don't
| move.
|
| There are multiple moving ads in between paras of a long form
| online articles which is a much worse experience than reading
| the same article in print.
| blakesterz wrote:
| There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me.
| I've no idea what it was, or is now, but it's about a million
| times more than the cost of me reading every new story on the
| NY Times website today. Maybe not a million times, but it's
| certainly much higher.
|
| So while I do agree newspapers have always been ads with some
| news thrown in there to get people to look at the paper,
| there were some much higher costs there in the paper part of
| the newspaper (and printers and delivery people and so on).
| In theory the cost of how I read "the paper" now should be
| much lower, so if I pay to subscribe to the website maybe
| there shouldn't be ANY ads? Or far fewer?
|
| I guess my thinking is nytimes.com isn't the same thing as
| The NY Times I get delivered to my house, so maybe things
| like ads should be treated in a different way? Sure the
| people that make it and reporters and news and all that are
| the same, but how I consume the actual thing is significantly
| different and has a different cost model.
|
| Plus those print ads were/are WAY different in so many ways.
| untog wrote:
| > There was a real cost to printing single newspaper to me.
|
| There is also a higher cost to the subscriber to receive a
| newspaper compared to digital delivery, IIRC. So it is
| still proportional.
| windthrown wrote:
| It still costs a lot of money to send reporters all over
| the world and do lengthy investigative journalism,
| regardless of if it is delivered to you in print or digital
| format. And NYT does charge more for physical paper
| delivery than they do for online-only subscriptions.
| bb611 wrote:
| Home delivery NY Times is more than 2x the cost of digital
| (dependent on location), you're already getting the "no
| paper" discount by buying digital.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > So while I do agree newspapers have always been ads with
| some news thrown in there to get people to look at the
| paper, there were some much higher costs there in the paper
| part of the newspaper
|
| Distribution costs went down, but so did ad revenue.
|
| It used to be that a subscription primarily paid for the
| cost of printing/distribution, and the real profit came
| from advertising. Unfortunately, print ads use to pay
| significantly more than web ads do today. So while the
| distribution costs are lower, most newspapers now need both
| revenue sources.
| romanows wrote:
| They were not interested in providing an ad-free option as of
| ~1 year ago, I asked.
| monadic2 wrote:
| > This has been true since approximately the beginning of
| newspaper-time.
|
| Newspaper journalism has been a joke the entire time too, so
| it's not clear what your point is. The NyTimes is a shining
| example of how having two sets of customers to please lowers
| the quality of reported news.
| blub wrote:
| A well-known German magazine offers an ad-free experience for
| 2EUR. Several newspapers have similar offers.
|
| So actually it's peanuts, not 50% more.
| catalogia wrote:
| > _This has been true since approximately the beginning of
| newspaper-time._
|
| This article posted yesterday about cascading collapses seems
| relevant: https://www.ben-
| evans.com/benedictevans/2020/5/4/covid-and-c...
|
| Business models that used to work well can collapse in a
| hurry.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They should be self hosting ads just like print. If they were
| smart 20 years ago they could have become Doubleclick.
| asdff wrote:
| It would be unblockable too if they just had them as static
| images in the page. Unless you spent hours tailoring your
| filters and engaging in an arms race with the sysadmin, you
| wouldn't ever be able to win and correctly call an image an
| image and an ad an ad.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| When Doubleclick emerged they _were_ essentially self
| hosting ads.
|
| Back then the digital vision wasn't in those media centres.
| They got online quickly, but they were not operating active
| engineering departments. Their industry was news.
| Advertising was a supplement, not the primary business.
| Hindsight is 20/20, for sure, though.
|
| I think this is a good move by NYT. I only wish the
| companies I've been associated with had the kind of
| resources to do the same. But it's expensive to even start
| something like that. For many companies in the space the
| resources are already spread thin.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Unfortunately, what has been true since the beginning of
| newspaper time changes in the digital era, as every newspaper
| has learned painfully.
|
| If too many users don't expect to see ads once they
| subscribe, then it doesn't matter what the cost model is; NYT
| has to adapt to the market's demands, change their costs, or
| shut down.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I find it a little funny that you're picking on NYT for
| that one. They were one of the first to offer digital-only
| subscriptions and their numbers have been climbing steadily
| since around 2011 when the introduced their metered
| paywall.
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-
| of-t...
|
| It's not that users don't expect to see ads that revenue is
| down. It's that the ad-sell business has been effectively
| taken over by a few large actors who promise all kinds of
| growth because of their targeted/tracking ad networks.
|
| And presently ad revenue is down even further because many
| businesses first spending cuts were in advertising for
| Q2/Q3 since they aren't operating anyway. That said, this
| last point is only speaking from my own present industry
| experience.
| fma wrote:
| They could have multiple tiers.
|
| 1) Free = 10 articles per month 2) Basic subscription =
| Unlimited articles, with ads 3) Premier subscription =
| Unlimited articles and no ads.
| Kylekramer wrote:
| Existence of Tier 3 reduces Tier 2's value more than
| money taken from Tier 3.
|
| NYT's sales pitch to advertisers is access to the
| intellectual/monetary elite. Saying "here, you can access
| only the less spendy ones" isn't going to be good.
| s_dev wrote:
| I don't understand this. I'm a paying subscriber -- I haven't
| seen any ads. Maybe I'm missing them:
|
| https://imgur.com/8oqmgIG
|
| Can you show me? Perhaps this is an EU vs US edition thing. I'm
| EU.
| ardy42 wrote:
| Ads are definitely in the mobile app for paying US
| subscribers.
|
| And, no, I don't mind them. I'm _very_ anti-ad, but financing
| and having access to functional journalism is more important
| than avoiding ads.
| s_dev wrote:
| I can confirm I don't see any ads in the Native Mobile App.
|
| Again must an EU vs US thing.
| ThisIsTheWay wrote:
| > financing and having access to functional journalism is
| more important than avoiding ads
|
| I'd say a vast majority of people agree, and are willing to
| pay a premium to support journalists AND not see
| advertisements. Unfortunately that's not an option.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Arguably it's hard to have a functioning journalism if it's
| funded - and therefore directed and censored - by the needs
| of advertisers.
| whakim wrote:
| At the vast majority of publications, there's
| intentionally no relationship between advertising-type
| decision-making and what the editorial staff decides to
| write about.
| asdff wrote:
| Someone definitely had a short position make profit when
| Bloomberg was publishing that crap about TSMC a while ago
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Except when they write submarine pieces, which are in
| fact just ads in sheep's clothing.
|
| But besides that, advertisers having no direct decision-
| making powers in news publishing doesn't mean journalism
| doesn't get corrupted by it. From the POV of the
| publisher, advertising can be seen as a magic button that
| makes them a little bit of money each time a visitor
| presses it. Having it as the main profit source, their
| primary driver now becomes ensuring as many visitors as
| possible press this button as frequently as possible.
| That's how we arrive at reputable publications serving
| clickbait, writing outrage-inducing noninformative
| articles, and embedding chumboxes in their articles.
| That's how the "invented pyramid" - the golden standard
| of news publishing that nobody cares about anymore -
| became dead and buried.
| whakim wrote:
| I had to look up "submarine pieces" are, but they don't
| seem at all related to the effects of advertising on what
| editorial teams write about. In my experience that just
| sounds like shoddy journalism, and editors shouldn't be
| letting that pass (even though it happens).
|
| What you're describing isn't a new phenomenon: newspaper
| ads have been around forever, and getting more people to
| read your newspaper or click on your articles has always
| increased profit. That's why most reputable newspapers,
| when they get large enough, build strong firewalls
| between the business and editorial sides of the company
| such that publishers cannot exert pressure over their
| editorial team even if they were short-sighted enough to
| try.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > I had to look up "submarine pieces" are, but they don't
| seem at all related to the effects of advertising on what
| editorial teams write about. In my experience that just
| sounds like shoddy journalism, and editors shouldn't be
| letting that pass (even though it happens).
|
| What did you find? I assumed the term meant something
| like a sponsored-content advertorial, but after actually
| Googling it, it looks like the term isn't a common one.
| All I get are hits about Grand Theft Auto V and Peter
| Madsen.
|
| It seems like the term stems from this article
| (http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html). If that's
| correct, I'm inclined to agree that it's just shoddy
| journalism, and the better publications don't let it
| through:
|
| > Different publications vary greatly in their reliance
| on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade
| press, who make most of their money from advertising and
| would give the magazines away for free if advertisers
| would let them. [2] The average trade publication is a
| bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to
| make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for
| "content" that some will print your press releases almost
| verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read
| like articles.
|
| > At the other extreme are publications like the New York
| Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go
| out and find their own stories, at least some of the
| time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and
| skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every
| publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the
| print edition of the Times. [3]
|
| > [3] Different sections of the Times vary so much in
| their standards that they're practically different
| papers. Whoever fed the style section reporter this story
| about suits coming back would have been sent packing by
| the regular news reporters.
|
| One of the anecdotes later in the article really
| emphasizes to me how public relations is literally
| propaganda with a PR makeover:
|
| > Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated,
| based on some fairly informal math, that there were about
| 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this
| number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact"
| was out there in print, we could quote it to other
| publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20%
| of the online store market.
|
| It the mechanics sound similar to the Soviet
| propaganda/disinformation campaign that pushed the idea
| that the US military created AIDS/HIV:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'd say this is a new phenomenon, to the extent people no
| longer read whole newspapers, but individual articles.
| Previously, there was no point in clickbait beyond
| optimizing the front page. If a reader bought the paper,
| that's about all the money you could get from them. In
| the Internet era, every single article is its own earning
| unit, so every one has to be optimized to maximize ad
| impressions. Hence clickbait, chumboxes, slideshows, and
| countless other forms of crap replacing actual
| journalism.
| ardy42 wrote:
| Yeah, but you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the
| good. Right now it's like a three-legged stool where
| advertising revenue is one of the legs.
| ra7 wrote:
| You definitely see ads in their mobile app. Haven't seen any
| in the browser, but then I use an ad blocker.
| mikestew wrote:
| For mobile apps of any stripe, pi-hole takes care of those
| ads, including those in the NYT app.
| choward wrote:
| Why on earth do you need an app to read news articles?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Because the experience is so much more intru...err
| immersive!
| [deleted]
| ThisIsTheWay wrote:
| You don't, its just an option
| SenorSourdough wrote:
| I do not see ads by default as an NYT subscriber but they
| have prompted me with a big bottom banner splash in the past
| to allow ads as a subscriber. I declined and haven't seen any
| ads that I'm aware of since.
|
| Sounds like there are ads in the app maybe? But I see zero in
| the browser as well.
| notatoad wrote:
| with my adblocker turned off, here's what i see as a paying
| subscriber in canada:
|
| front page: https://imgur.com/AgxUJX1
|
| article: https://imgur.com/Np72LFU
| sammycdubs wrote:
| I honestly would be less frustrated if their ads weren't so
| obnoxious and ugly. Animated ads in the middle of an article
| are the absolute worst.
| pletsch wrote:
| The opposite of this is Google-like ads where they're blended
| so much into the page you have to look out for them
| monadic2 wrote:
| Lemme know when journalists stop having two customers to please.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I'm ready to see all of the third-party junk go, not just at NYT
| but everywhere. Also ready to get back to first party ad serving
| - manage it yourself, own the quality, and we will all be better
| off.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Makes sense. I think the promise of ad targeting doesn't add up
| to value for many customers of ads.
|
| When I look at a lot of content sites, the targeted ads are
| pretty ridiculous and often off-brand. I live in a state capital
| and the ads that I see on my local newspaper are random bullshit
| based on my kid's YouTube habits and a pop up auto play video for
| an online pharmacy.
|
| In the print edition, the ads are much smarter and more
| lucrative. Policy advertising for the legislative session, etc.
| kleer001 wrote:
| I hope beyond hope that someday in the future our decedents will
| look back on the scourge of advertisement as the cancer it was.
| zwaps wrote:
| My favorite targeting so far: Cruise line adverts on a webpage
| talking about the coronavirus.
| beloch wrote:
| "But changes to major web browsers to crack down on third-party
| data collection and new internet privacy rules are making that
| practice less viable."
|
| Notice that the NYT's new ad system has not been prompted by
| privacy-minded people who install privacy and ad-blocking
| plugins. NYT is concerned that coming changes to base browsers
| will make 3rd party tracking so ineffective for targeting ads
| that a homebrew solution relying on users checking off boxes that
| describe themselves will work better.
|
| Given the rapacious ingenuity ad hucksters have shown in the
| past, I suspect 3rd party data collection will find a way to keep
| doing it's thing and, likely, become even more invasive, at least
| for a little while. However, the fact that some companies are
| finally jumping ship is significant. I've long maintained that
| the ad industry's war on user privacy was ultimately self-
| defeating. This might be the beginning of the end.
| confounded wrote:
| It will likely lead to centralization.
|
| If third-party cookies and device fingerprinting are blocked,
| then how can you track users who saw an ad twice, before
| deciding to buy?
|
| You can't with much certainty, unless they're using Chrome, and
| you're Google.
|
| For the NYT who can rely on "brand" (as opposed to
| "performance") advertising this isn't a big deal. They can
| charge a lot just to show the image on their site. They have
| strong enough prestige that many advertisers will not require a
| third-party arbiter of tracking or impressions.
|
| But I worry that the direction of change will favor Google as
| an advertising behemoth, and extend their influence over the
| web and publishing.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| My concern with describing your ad interests manually is that
| it will most likely lead to fingerprinting. You'd essentially
| be building your own unique identifier by choosing ad
| categories.
|
| If fingerprinting wasn't an issue (either because the industry
| was honest or we had effective laws to punish offenders) then
| I'd say that's a great idea and could even be implemented in
| browsers as an "Accept-Advertising" header (just like the
| headers we already have for language and encoding).
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| I'm not sure it will be just "users checking off boxes that
| describe themselves".
|
| I don't see in the article any mention of how they will collect
| data. While some will definitely come from users, I suspect
| they will build profiles based on what a user reads.
| C1sc0cat wrote:
| First party data is a big theme for big enterprise marketing
| these days - as anyone who works in that area will tell you.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The NYT currently has a LOT of third party JS and cookies. Enough
| that I think it is noticeably impacting performance and user
| experience.
|
| Which hopefully was another motivation to cut it back. I mean,
| "privacy" should be enough, but when it's making your user
| experience terrible _that_ should be enough too! (Although could
| lead to trying to performance optimize it instead of getting rid
| of it; getting rid of it is the right call).
| Swizec wrote:
| I opened Business Insider on my girlfriend's computer without
| adblock last night and the fans sounded like it was ready for
| takeoff. Couldn't even scroll smoothly to find what we were
| looking for.
|
| Kudos to NYT for trying to stop this madness. It's gone way too
| far
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Here are the ads I see on business insider:
|
| - Taboola (The supermoon is coming, 17 biggest exercise
| myths, what is COVID recovery like, Does anyone know if COVID
| will do away in warm weather)
|
| - Los Angeles drivers are stunned by this new rule for auto
| insurance. (I live 3000 miles away from LA and have never
| stepped foot in Southern California.)
|
| - Ron Paul's message for every American.
|
| - The forever spin top, made in Canada (aka we have no ads to
| sell)
|
| - A background check company (lol)
|
| - MemSQL (probably the only potentially relevant ad)
|
| I would be terrified if my ability to get paid was based on
| this crap.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| I see Taboola as a coarse grained sieve, to preselect into
| different target audiences, based on what sort of trash
| they click. At least it appeared to me like that when i
| fiddled with my blocking for testing, and wondered why i
| ever should click on that crap? Most useless.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Idling on the New York Times's homepage without an adblocker in
| Firefox, Activity Monitor says the tab is using ~10% of one
| core of my cpu, and About:Performance says it's using ~200 MB
| of memory.
|
| Now, I have a pretty fast CPU--a 4790K--and it wasn't that long
| ago that most computers had less than 200 MB of RAM total. And,
| you could read on those computers just fine.
|
| On the other hand, if I repeat the same test with my Slack tab,
| I get 30% of CPU and 400 MB of RAM. Slack doesn't have ads, and
| IM clients are another thing that worked just fine 20 years
| ago.
|
| I guess my point is, the web is bloated, and I'm not sure why
| we're harping on The Times.
| dahart wrote:
| It really isn't easy to make any fair claims about memory
| usage unless you're being extremely careful. The browsers and
| apps do all kinds of crazy caching with freely available
| memory, for performance reasons, and they can get by with a
| lot less than what you're quoting. Try seeing how memory
| scales if you open 10 or 100 tabs. It might seem super
| bloated until you're about to run out of memory, and then
| somehow seemingly magically be able to still open two or
| three times as many tabs.
| all_blue_chucks wrote:
| A six year old CPU can still be described as "pretty fast?"
| Moore's Law really must be dead and buried.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think it's possible for Moore's law to still be true
| while single core performance stagnates
| kroltan wrote:
| 8 threads, 8MB cache, 4GHz? Pretty fast, yes. Not the
| fastest, by far, but are you really arguing that casual web
| browsing for news viewing (viewing! the stats are not even
| for page load, but _idle_ ) should require top of the line
| equipment?
| all_blue_chucks wrote:
| No, I'm saying Moore's Law suggest(s|ed) that every 18
| months your chip's speed relative to current offerings is
| about half what it was. And this old chip has had four
| cycles of that exponential decay.
|
| I just built a 12 core system I would describe as "pretty
| fast." A high end consumer desktop these days is 16
| cores. A couple years from now, that will be considered
| "pretty fast."
| gshdg wrote:
| Actually, Moore's law says nothing about speed, just the
| number of transistors you can stuff into the thing. Plus
| progress has been leveling off.
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| I think it's more a function of modern OS's not really
| taking that much more from the CPU than they used to be-
| IIRC, Windows 10 is _faster_ than Windows 7 on slow
| hardware because it disables more nice-to-have features
| (think Aero).
|
| CPUs continue to get more powerful, but the minimum
| hardware requirements for newer editions of operating
| systems tends to not follow the same curve that new game
| releases do. (I can't play Rainbow 6 Siege on my Ryzen 5
| 3550H + GTX 1050 laptop, but CSGO runs fine on it and my
| i7-2670QM laptop mobo with a GTX 1060 strapped to it.)
| nullify88 wrote:
| Strange. I'd expect you to be hitting at least 40-50fps
| on 1080 High settings in R6 Siege with those specs.
| Minimum system requirements for R6 Siege is an i3. Maybe
| because its a laptop you are either hitting thermal
| limits or you have significantly less VRAM than the
| desktop counterpart.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Minimum system requirements for R6 Siege is an i3.
|
| I've never played R6 Siege and have no idea how it
| performs, but I would just like to say that this is
| effectively meaningless and I hate how games put it in
| their system requirements. Writing "moderately fast CPU"
| would carry more useful information. A Westmere Core
| i3-530 from 2010 is not going to perform anything like a
| Coffee Lake Core i3-8100B from 2018.
|
| (I'm not that smart, I looked up the model numbers on
| Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Co
| re_i3_micropro...)
| all_blue_chucks wrote:
| Oh I completely agree that basic desktop computing is
| still reasonably responsive on older CPUs; I'm just
| pointing out that the mere idea of a six year old CPU
| being called "pretty fast" by current standards would
| have been unthinkable for most of my lifetime.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > IIRC, Windows 10 is faster than Windows 7 on slow
| hardware.
|
| This has not been my experience with Windows 7 ==> 10.
| kevindong wrote:
| > it wasn't that long ago that most computers had less than
| 200 MB of RAM total
|
| I don't think you're aware of how much time as passed since
| 200 MB of RAM was the norm. Even in 2005, lower end Dell
| laptops ($639) had 256 MB of RAM as the minimum [0]. The 2002
| PowerBook G4's base model had 256 MB [1].
|
| [0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20050309050556/http://www1.us
| .del...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4#Models
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| All I can say is Slack performs just fine for me on my Mac
| laptop, I never notice it being laggy.
|
| When I go to NYTimes without an ad blocker, it takes a long
| tie to show up, it sometimes freezes my scrolling while it
| loads things, things jump around on the page so when I'm
| trying to click something I get the wrong target as some ad
| loads and moves things around, it can be 10 seconds until the
| page stabilizes after load. I do not experience that with
| Slack.
|
| How does Slack use so much RAM and CPU and still perform
| better than a mostly static page of text and graphics? I
| dunno. But it does. In the end the RAM and CPU usage matter
| to me theoretically, but all that really matters is the
| actually experienced interface. The NYT may not be the
| _worst_ , but it's definitely worse than many, and the
| comparison to Slack is odd to me, cause my experience with
| Slack is that is quickly responsive with no lag.
|
| You have a different experience, for you nytimes loads faster
| and has interactivity with less lag/freezing up than Slack,
| which for you has a lot of lag/freezing/slow load problems?
| rb808 wrote:
| Now compare to nj.com
| catalogia wrote:
| > _I 'm not sure why we're harping on The Times._
|
| Because _' 10% of a core and 200 MB of ram'_ just to read a
| few headlines is obscene, and slack being _even worse_ doesn
| 't make the NYT's bloat less obscene.
|
| With my uBO/uMatrix settings, about:performance in firefox
| reports that the nytimes.com homepage takes 7.9 MB of ram
| (and immeasurably little CPU time, because I disabled
| javascript.) https://lite.cnn.com/en/ is better insofar as it
| takes 2.6 MB of ram.
| SilasX wrote:
| Thank you for making that point and alerting me to the
| existence of the far more usable Lite CNN site.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I remember when computers were faster than me. Those numbers
| barely keep up with my standard issue brain, which is
| 40-year-old tech and can just about read the newspaper and
| carry on intermittent conversation at the same time.
| augustt wrote:
| As another datapoint, this HN page uses 56MB in Chrome for
| me.
| azinman2 wrote:
| 47.10MB in Safari
| specialist wrote:
| Wow.
|
| There's now ~388 comments. Source is 529kb and content
| 114kb (simple cut and paste of page, no markup).
|
| Those are some impressive ratios.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| That's actually strangely high for HN, I get 7.6 MB in
| Firefox.
| jeltz wrote:
| I get 11.1 MB in Firefox.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 17.35 MB for me in Firefox 76.0.1 on MacOS 10.15.4.
|
| But it has been a couple hours since your comment and the
| other replies :)
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I have 10.4 MB on firefox and, on Chrome is 33 MB.
| Mattwmaster58 wrote:
| 15Mb when measured through about:performance 70Mb when
| measured through about:memory
|
| I don't know why they are different.
| kroltan wrote:
| 11MB on Firefox, Windows.
| OJFord wrote:
| _M_? Are you sure?
|
| I get a 58kB HTML document, plus 2kB each CSS & JS, 3 *
| ~400B images, and a 7kB favicon.
|
| Edit: Oh sorry, RAM. Leaving comment just to compare page
| size to RAM use for interest.
| iamaelephant wrote:
| Because this is an article about The Times.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Slack has an entire app ecosystem layer in it these days, not
| to mention they've never really trimmed down the electron
| fat. Slack hasn't been a contender for "well made" in quite a
| few months.
|
| NYT should be a relatively simple website. Sure, they have
| some very nice interactive stories and we'll give those a
| pass, but even just plain text articles load an amazing
| amount of cruft. It's text, just send the damn text.
|
| Everyone else being bloated isn't an excuse.
| x3blah wrote:
| "It's text, just send the damn text."
|
| They only send what the user requests.
|
| Using a software program that makes automatic requests that
| you are not easily in control of, e.g., a popular web
| browser, might give the impression that _they_ control what
| is sent.
|
| They do not control what is sent. The user does.^1
|
| The user makes a request and they send a response.
|
| One of the requests a fully-automatic web browser makes to
| NYT is to static01.nyt.com
|
| Personally, as a user who prefers text-only, this is the
| only request I need to make. As such I don't really need a
| heavily marketed, fully-automatic, graphical, ad-blocking
| web browser to make a single request for some text.^2
| #! /bin/sh case $1 in world
| |w*) x=world # shortcut: w ;;us |u*)
| x=us # shortcut: u ;;politics |p*)
| x=politics # shortcut: p ;;nyregion |n*)
| x=nyregion # shortcut: n ;;business |bu*)
| x=business # shortcut: bu ;;opinion |o*)
| x=opinion # shortcut: o ;;technology |te*)
| x=technology # shortcut: te ;;science |sc*)
| x=science # shortcut: sc ;;health |h*)
| x=health # shortcut: h ;;sports |sp*)
| x=sports # shortcut: sp ;;arts |a*)
| x=arts # shortcut: a ;;books |bo*)
| x=books # shortcut: bo ;;style |st*)
| x=style # shortcut: st ;;food |f*)
| x=food # shortcut: f ;;travel |tr*)
| x=travel # shortcut: tr ;;magazine |m*)
| x=magazine # shortcut: m ;;t-magazine |t-*)
| x=t-magazine # shortcut: t- ;;realestate |r*)
| x=realestate # shortcut: r ;;*) echo
| usage: $0 section exec sed -n
| '/x=/!d;s/.*x=//;/sed/!p' $0 esac curl
| -s https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$x/
| index.jsonp Example: Make simple page of
| titles, article urls and captions, where above script is
| named "nyt". nyt tr | sed '/\"headline\":
| \"/{s//<p>/;s/\".*/<\/p>/;p};/\"full\":
| \"/{s//<p>/;s/..$/<\/p>/;p};/\"link\": \"/{s///;s/
| *//;s/\".*//;s|.*|<a href=&>&</a>|;p}' > travel.html
| firefox ./travel.html
|
| Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22125882
|
| The truth is that they _are_ just sending the damn text.
| However you are voluntarily choosing to use a software
| program that is automatically making requests for things
| other than the text of the article, i.e., "cruft".
|
| 1. The Google-sponsored HTTP/[23] protocol is seeking to
| change this dynamic, so if websites sending stuff to you
| without you requesting it first bothers you, you might want
| to think about how online advertisers and the companies
| that enable them might use these new protocols.
|
| 2. However I might use one for for viewing images, watching
| video, reading PDFs, etc., offline. Web browsers are useful
| programs for consuming media. It is in the simple task of
| making HTTP requests that their utility has diminished over
| time. The user is not really in control.
| avn2109 wrote:
| Pro comment here which should be way higher up the page.
| Good comment content, good Unixbeard vibe, great use of
| sed.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The New York Times's Homepage _isn 't_ just text though. I
| see a lot of large, high-quality images, many of which
| transition to other images so you can see multiple visuals
| for a story. There's a "live updates" sidebar and a real-
| time stock ticker. There are video and audio embeds.
|
| > Everyone else being bloated isn't an excuse.
|
| It's not, but I'd rather focus on the worst offenders
| instead of the half-decent ones. I didn't compare it to
| Slack because I thought Slack was a good example--I did it
| for the exact opposite reason.
|
| And, as long as there are sites that are so much heavier
| and yet seem to be doing fine (I don't like it, but it is
| what it is), I doubt NY Times is removing 3rd-party ads due
| to performance issues. It could be a nice side effect,
| though.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| For comparison, I disabled ublock origin and privacy
| badger and loaded https://fivethirtyeight.com which is in
| the same realm - heavy text content with several
| interactive widgets, video and audio embeds.
|
| Render time for my (aging) macbook pro is within the
| acceptable threshold (< 1500ms), memory snapshot in
| firefox is ~90Mb, and it feels like it loads quickly and
| responsively. It could be better - but it's infinitely
| more usable than NYT for me.
| [deleted]
| cptskippy wrote:
| > Slack hasn't been a contender for "well made" in quite a
| few months.
|
| It was a contender?
|
| > NYT should be a relatively simple website.
|
| There's editors from the NYT lurking here who will strongly
| disagree.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Once upon a time, Slack was actually really solid and I
| happily used it. It.. was quite some time ago.
|
| And sure, obviously NYT is more complex than throwing
| textfiles at users.. but do you really need to be running
| A/B tests for acquisition and have such a complicated
| pipeline to buying a subscription? Do you need dozens of
| analytics suites? Data is useful, but only to an upper
| bound of what you can meaningfully analyze.
| stimpson_j_cat wrote:
| .
| jsjw7sbw wrote:
| Are you working for booking.com?
| cptskippy wrote:
| I don't disagree with you AND I've already been chastised
| once in the last week by a NYT staff member for daring to
| challenge their assertion that the web should be and
| overly complicated mess.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Cutting through institutional pressures is not easy,
| especially when those pressures are well entrenched. I
| recently had to rid our SEO department of a religious
| belief that everything in creation must be server-side
| rendered or it couldn't be indexed and the phrase "holy
| war" applies.
|
| So, I have some empathy for the NYT staff as individual
| contributors, but as an org, it's time to evolve.
| faho wrote:
| > it wasn't that long ago that most computers had less than
| 200 MB of RAM total.
|
| Half-Life 2 lists 512mb ram as required. It came out in 2004.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I was thinking another decade further back than that, or
| so. :)
|
| Also, Half Life 2 was a state-of-the-art video game for an
| audience that largely had fancy gaming PCs.
| virtue3 wrote:
| Video games still target pretty mainstream pc specs. They
| have to, or no one can run the game. Sans Crysis.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Not every game is Crysis for sure, but for instance, a
| lot of AAA games right now require 8 GB of memory
| minimum. The $400 Surface Go 2 that came yesterday has
| only 4 GB of memory in the base config, and such specs
| aren't isn't particularly uncommon. Not that you'd be
| playing AAA games on that machine even if it had more
| memory, but hence my point.
| lazyjones wrote:
| The retail version required 256MB, it's the Steam version
| that needed 512.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I can't help but wonder if all these extensions are actually
| delivering the promised value. After all many media
| organizations got taken by FB's lies about video out performing
| text, to the point where they made significant staff changes.
| Is it unreasonable to think they fell for something similar
| from the ad networks?
| Scott_Sanderson wrote:
| Yep, I noticed the site loads much faster in Brave Browser
| which blocks all ads and trackers.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Brave: A browser that blocks ads/tracking so it can integrate
| its own as a business model.
|
| Why do people use it? I can understand blocking ads with e.g.
| ublock, but I cannot understand wanting a browser that shows
| you desktop ads for internet points.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Brave, the self-annoited "brave" answer to that question
| everyone is asking: "why isn't there another middleman
| between me and the producers of content I like, skimming
| another 30% of their income off the top?"
| mthoms wrote:
| Actually, they are trying to do the _exact_ opposite --
| which is to eliminate the middlemen and make paying
| creators more frictionless.
|
| Yes, if you opt-in to the system, they will take a cut,
| which is entirely reasonable if the model ends up being
| better for users and creators.
|
| Time will tell if that's the case, but it's an
| interesting experiment.
| MiroF wrote:
| > Why do people use it? I can understand blocking ads with
| e.g. ublock, but I cannot understand wanting a browser that
| shows you desktop ads for internet points.
|
| Does it actually do this? When I had Brave, I never noticed
| that.
| snazz wrote:
| It's optional. I am strongly against Brave (the privacy
| wording, taking cryptocurrency to be "donated" to content
| creators who hadn't heard of Brave and then keeping it in
| "escrow" indefinitely, etc). However, if you are aware of
| the risks and the company's not-stellar reputation among
| security people, you can use it if you want.
| billme wrote:
| Wow!!! - Brave is holding payments in escrow for parties
| that did not even sign up for the service, that's not
| shady at all. Even makes me wonder what's happening to
| all the funds in escrow.
| DennisP wrote:
| If they're doing it right, it's locked in a smart
| contract, in a bunch of individual balances that get
| unlocked when an admin at Brave provides a withdrawal
| address. That way, while they _could_ steal from those
| accounts, it 'd be readily apparent to any intended
| recipient whose funds were stolen.
| billme wrote:
| Let me be more clear, using an example. Appears Brave
| only attempts to contact the Whois email after the funds
| in escrow exceed $100 USD.
|
| Let's say the have million in escrow, they invest it,
| don't lose any of the funds, and 5 years later end up
| paying out all funds due.
|
| Does the "all funds due" just the million, is it the
| million plus the returns they made on million, is it
| adjusted for inflation because they sat on it 5-years,
| etc.?
|
| Comparable example might be the funds held in escrow by
| gift cards; my guess is unless Brave is being super
| careful what they are doing is or will be defined as
| illegal.
| xur17 wrote:
| It's worth noting that the funds they are holding are
| funds they are giving out to users to donate to websites
| (as part of their boostrap fund), so it's not really as
| horrible as you are saying (but still.. weird).
| billme wrote:
| It is horrible & toxic -- no party regardless of intent
| should be collecting funds on behave of another party
| unless that party has legally agreed for it -- or they're
| legally using a well known structure for doing so that's
| audited; for example, in the country Brave is
| headquartered, a non-profit business.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1085238644926005248
|
| > A final update on the thread about Brave: they're now
| opt-in for creators! While it's still possible to tip
| folks who haven't opted in, the data is stored in-browser
| and the UI has been clarified. These are good changes,
| and they fix the complaints I had!
| billme wrote:
| Brave doesn't make it easy to see the changes they made
| without installing the software and likely having to buy
| their crypto to test it; appears Brave is still selling
| the tokens for third-parties without their knowledge.
| System should be you send funds, transfer is not done
| until 3rd party authorization is received, 3rd party has
| no fee cash option instead (fees if any paid by donor) --
| and transaction voids after 30-days.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| > Brave doesn't make it easy to see the changes they made
| without installing the software
|
| https://github.com/brave/brave-browser
|
| > and likely having to buy their crypto to test it
|
| I have 24 BAT and I didn't buy them. I donate some of
| what I earn from ads to a project maintainer on Github.
|
| > Brave is still selling the tokens for third-parties
| without their knowledge
|
| Brave doesn't sell tokens. They did raise money through a
| token sale but that's not relevant.
|
| > System should be you send funds, transfer is not done
| until 3rd party authorization is received, 3rd party has
| no fee cash option instead (fees if any paid by donor) --
| and transaction voids after 30-days.
|
| The transfer isn't done until the creator verifies with
| Brave. See my comment above.
|
| Doing a minimum of reading (wiki, brave website, reddit)
| would do wonders for your comments.
| billme wrote:
| So Brave blocks AD from one creator, made gave you tokens
| to give a another person of your choice for watching
| their ADs?
|
| What am I missing? You're basically stealing, fencing the
| goods, and somehow giving away the proceeds makes that
| okay and I need to waste my time reading more?
|
| As for doing more reading, sounds like a personal attack,
| if so, combined with your "Robin Hood" life style, maybe
| you're the one that needs to spend more time.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| It's not a personal attack. You have made so many false
| claims. I'm out.
| billme wrote:
| Where did I make false claims?
| BrendanEich wrote:
| No, you're mistaken. We don't hold payments at all (we
| are not licensed to intermediate). If you use the browser
| to tip a creator who hasn't signed up, your browser holds
| the tip and retries every 30 days up to 90th day.
| billme wrote:
| (Please clearly state you how you're related to Brave in
| your profile if you don't want me to repeatedly ask you
| when posting comments.)
|
| Feel free to link to public documentation on Brave's site
| showing the screenshots of Brave's workflow, policies,
| etc.
|
| As is, you're comment assumes I understand a lot of
| things, which you say I don't, then go on to not explain
| them; tip, comments, tweets, etc are a poor place to do
| this.
|
| For example, what has happened before the 30th day; as in
| please list from start to finish everything that happens
| from me downloading Brave, finding myself, making a
| "payment" to myself, and nothing nothing. Also, if
| relevant, disclose any and all business policies &
| procedure; for example, is there a difference between a
| $5, $101, $1001, etc transaction.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Brendan is the CEO of Brave and fairly famous for a
| number of things, so I can't say I understand how you (as
| someone who is apparently savvy enough to understand how
| Brave works) don't know who what his relation to it is?
| fhars wrote:
| Didn't you just say that you stopped pretending to accept
| tips for people you have not signed up in January 2019?
| And yet here you say that you still have this same
| deceptive behaviour in your browser?
| BrendanEich wrote:
| It's opt-in, we do not and will not turn it on by
| default. If you want to try it, click on the triangle in
| the URL bar on the right. Thanks.
| jessmay wrote:
| It's almost as if you can opt into it if you want to.
| Amazing.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| That's not an argument for using Brave. If you don't opt
| into it, why use Brave at all? You're essentially using a
| glorified Chrome with uBlock.
| thanatropism wrote:
| Brave for iOS is an ad-blocked browser. Maybe there are
| others, I know none.
|
| It also auto-closes tabs I might have browsed in
| anonymous mode. Safari doesn't, and it's quite a
| nightmare to fatfinger into anonymous mode and see
| whatever you had opened anon mode for.
| snazz wrote:
| MobileSafari natively supports content blockers as well.
| You can turn them off temporarily or for a specific site.
| There's a variety of apps in the App Store that include
| block lists; just flip a switch in Settings similarly to
| how you'd add a new keyboard or autofill provider. The
| adblocker app doesn't get your browsing history, it just
| provides the list of blocked elements to Safari.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > If you don't opt into it, why use Brave at all?
|
| Sounds like you compiled a statement like "give me the
| factors of 26, but you can't use 1, 2, or 13." If you
| don't opt into it, you _definitely_ aren 't using it.
|
| As for why someone would opt into it: some people don't
| mind being tracked but they care about who's doing the
| tracking and how their data gets integrated. If Brave
| shuts down everyone else's tracking but then Brave is
| building a profile on a user, that's fine for some.
| mthoms wrote:
| FWIW, if you opt in, any profile that Brave builds (for
| ad matching purposes) never leaves your machine. You can
| inspect or delete it any time.
|
| That's one part of the appeal -- that this stuff stays
| local.
| thanatropism wrote:
| Brave is also a bit faster on older Windows computers.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > Sounds like you compiled a statement like "give me the
| factors of 26, but you can't use 1, 2, or 13." If you
| don't opt into it, you definitely aren't using it.
|
| Parent comment said that the business model of Brave is
| opt in, implying that they're recommending you use brave
| but not opt in to the crypto/ad business model. I think
| it's perfectly fair to ask what is the value prop of
| Brave if you don't use their crypto/ad system.
| catalogia wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, Brave is the only browser that
| blocks ads by default. Personally I just use uBO/uMatrix
| on Firefox, but I can certainly understand why some
| people might prefer a more streamlined default
| experience.
|
| The fact that so many people get bent out of shape about
| Brave blocking ads by default is probably also seen as a
| positive signal by many people who hate ads. If Brave
| pisses off people who run ad-supported websites, that's a
| fantastic endorsement.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I guess if you can't figure out how to install uBO, then
| Brave makes sense. I suspect that the pool of people who
| care about blocking ads, can't figure out uBO, but are
| willing to install an extra browser is pretty small, but
| I have no skin in this game.
|
| I've never seen anyone angry about Brave blocking ads;
| what I've seen are people angry at Brave blocking ads
| _and adding their own_ , which is a drastically different
| complaint.
| basch wrote:
| Chrome+uBO isnt necessarily the better option, as far as
| raw performance.
|
| https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
|
| https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
|
| Using Chrome+uBO+uMatrix and Brave side by side, Brave
| just works better. Less knobs to fiddle with, sane
| defaults. Sure I love the power of uMatrix, but it comes
| with its own time sink managing it. Brave, out of the
| box, performs correctly in most situations, and switching
| from default to blocking all cookies, javascript, and
| fingerprinting is only a click each (and thats the
| advanced mode.)
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Now that's a good argument.
| basch wrote:
| Plus as far as their advertising goes (which I still
| think is pretty grey ethically to block ads and then show
| your own) its still privacy focused. If you opt into ads,
| you get OS notifications and they dont build some kind of
| profile of your behavior on their server. They send your
| client a list of ads, and your client knows which ads to
| show you, all targeting is local. Destroy your client,
| destroy the profile they have build of you. It might not
| be great, but they are clearly looking at advertising
| different than the rest of the marketing tech landscape,
| so kudos.
|
| Theyve somewhat gone back to the
| juno/netzero/kmartbluelight internet model. If you did
| want to be subjected to ads, at least they are in a
| consistent place in the user interface, and not all over
| random pages breaking performance and scroll.
|
| If I were forced to choose between two ads types, id pick
| Braves before the modern webs. Their product is like ad
| supported shareware. (The rest of the tipping and bat
| economy notwithstanding.)
| catalogia wrote:
| Last I checked, the number of people using Adblock Plus
| dwarfs the number of people using uBO, so there's clearly
| a pretty large number of people who find uBO difficult,
| or perhaps simply don't know about it. Either way, I
| don't use it and wouldn't invest in that company either;
| I wouldn't bet on them succeeding in the long run. But I
| think can certainly understand, if not agree with, the
| people who decide to use it.
|
| > _I've never seen anyone angry about Brave blocking ads;
| what I've seen are people angry at Brave blocking ads and
| adding their own, which is a drastically different
| complaint._
|
| I think for many people who hate ads, this distinction
| isn't really relevant. They like that Brave pisses off
| people who run websites with ads. Perhaps disliking
| website operators enough to cut off their nose to spite
| their face.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The difference between Adblock plus and uBO doesn't
| affect my point. Most people are fully capable of
| installing an ad blocker, and tons do.
|
| I guess I get people wanting to piss off those who run
| ads, but that applies to ad blockers as a whole. That's
| not an argument for Brave specifically.
| catalogia wrote:
| Well I can't defend it further than I have. It's not my
| intention to provide arguments for using Brave, merely to
| explain why I think many people have chosen to. You and I
| agree that Brave isn't the browser to use, but evidently
| plenty of people do want to use it and I think the
| reasons I've described explain a lot of that. I doubt
| it'd be causing so much consternation if that weren't the
| case.
|
| For website and ad network operators, it could be worse.
| Automated 'clickfraud' extensions could have gained
| traction. Maybe Brave will do that in the future too.
| bzb3 wrote:
| Chrome now has a gimped ad block API, brave is more
| flexible. It also comes with some anti fingerprinting
| measures and additional options.
| snazz wrote:
| uBlock Origin still works fine in Chromium today. Even if
| Google were to disallow it and other powerful adblockers,
| the alternative (similar to content blockers on
| MobileSafari) is not a serious problem, at least for me.
| I have Ka-Block! on my iPhone, which blocks ads just
| fine, despite having a much less powerful interface than
| uBO.
| bzb3 wrote:
| >uBlock Origin still works fine in Chromium today.
|
| They intended to gimp the API. Not sure if the changes
| are in effect already though.
|
| >Even if Google were to disallow it and other powerful
| adblockers, the alternative (similar to content blockers
| on MobileSafari) is not a serious problem, at least for
| me. I have Ka-Block! on my iPhone, which blocks ads just
| fine, despite having a much less powerful interface than
| uBO.
|
| Good for you. It's not enough for me. I even write my own
| rules for the sites I visit often.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You can write your own rules for most Safari content
| blockers. But if I don't trust websites not to invade my
| privacy, why would I trust a third party ad blocker that
| has access to my entire browsing history as opposed to
| the Apple method where the content blockers just give
| Safari a list of rules?
| bzb3 wrote:
| That's a very good point, but I have to say ublock origin
| has done nothing yet to breach my trust.
| mthoms wrote:
| Don't all ad-blockers work with (regex-like) rule lists
| these days?
| scarface74 wrote:
| The difference is that ad blockers traditionally
| intercepted your web requests to block ads meaning they
| had both network access and access to your browsing
| history.
|
| Content Blockers in Safari submit a list of rules to
| Safari and Safari blocks the requests. No third party has
| access to your browser history.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Note that Safari has added new APIs to allow for a
| content blocker to regain access to such information if
| you so choose.
| basch wrote:
| Because its considerably faster, they claim.
| https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/
| https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
|
| They rewrote ublock origin in rust, and its native to the
| product, not tacked on. Shady business model aside, they
| are making technical contributions to the world.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| There are a (fairly small) number of use-cases where
| Chromium-like behaviour is needed (my 90% of the time
| browser is FF) but I don't want a browser that's
| reporting my every move back to Google. AFAIK Brave fits
| that need. And no, I've not opted in to their ad system
| since I hate ads anywhere and everywhere and want them
| all to die.
| [deleted]
| billme wrote:
| Never looked at Brave's business model - and agree, it's
| possibly more toxic than ADs. That being Brave wants you to
| buy their currency to pay creators then the creators pay
| them to get paid. On top of that, they created their own AD
| network and are paying out 70% of profits to the users,
| which sounds like huge conflict of interest.
|
| EDIT: Appears Brave is even holding payments in escrow for
| parties that did not even sign up to receive payments,
| that's not shady at all. Even makes me wonder what's
| happening to all the funds in escrow.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| You could also just not spend any money and leave that
| feature disabled.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| And you could use Facebook and disable every tracking
| feature and hope they're honest.
|
| When someone does shady things in one area.. they
| probably do them in others.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| What then differentiates it from Firefox?
| mthoms wrote:
| Compatibility with Chrome, its plugin ecosystem, and
| developer tools -- but without the Google integration.
|
| It's got some competitors in this respect though. Namely
| Vivaldi and Edge.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| So basically ... Chromium?
| artificial wrote:
| Never, then that will completely nullify the ability to
| be outraged on others behalf and complain about it! I
| wonder if these are the folks that mash every button on
| the elevator, because everything must be enabled?
| billme wrote:
| Exactly how do I know Brave has not collected funds for
| me, but hasn't told me?
| artificial wrote:
| How do I know if there is an answer to this question if I
| haven't searched?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Worse they accept payment on behalf of creators who
| haven't even signed up. Surprised that's even legal. It's
| come up here before:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
| BrendanEich wrote:
| We quickly (by January 2019) corrected a mistake shipped
| in December 2018, so please update your priors on us. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20290942.
|
| Repeating out of date information _per se_ and to ascribe
| malice is never justified, whatever you think of ads.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I haven't investigated it since that thread, so I don't
| know what changes were made. Apologies if it was
| corrected and resolved, I'll check it out again, and
| assuming it has I certainly have no interest in spreading
| misinformation.
|
| However, I think the idea that telling people you were
| going to be collecting money on behalf of someone, not
| letting them know, and just keeping it isn't likely to
| have been some small "whoopsie." Building a system to let
| people know didn't happen by accident. The $100 threshold
| wasn't an oversight. Not including visual differentiation
| between verified and unverified creators wasn't a slip-
| up. These had to have been purposeful and thought-out
| decisions.
|
| I don't think the idea was to steal as much BAT as
| possible from would-be donors, it felt like a growth
| hack: you know, make it seem like Brave works everywhere,
| then one day when it is, we can all forget about the
| fake-it-till-you-make-it bit.
|
| Which is normally fine, but people tend to get defensive
| about their money.
| billme wrote:
| Feel free to explain how exactly Brave's actions were not
| intentional, this wasn't just a bug, but series of
| intentional actions via code, interfaces, emails,
| documentation, internal policies, etc.
|
| Further, comments, tweets, etc. generally are not the
| best way to communicate issues as complex as this, nor do
| I feel it the public's job to clean up or go out of their
| way. You made a mess, you clean it up.
|
| (You appears to be serial down voting; classy.)
| wmeredith wrote:
| The Napster guy did something similar with his micro-
| payments system. Did not go well.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| If you just block and free-ride, more power to you (this is
| within the rights of users, by law and by design of the web
| standards). However, many Brave users want to support
| creators by contributing regularly, and a lot of these
| users prefer to earn tokens they can give back rather than
| to self-fund their wallets.
|
| Browsers today, without strong tracking protection, are
| passive servants of ad-tech implemented via JavaScript.
| Average users don't know how to block. Most users don't
| subscribe widely at risk of overpaying (cross-subsidizing,
| the publishers call it). Brave's model not only cuts out
| ad-tech intermediaries, leaving only the browser in the
| middle -- we then let users opt in (with blind signature
| cryptography so our servers can't link ids or transactions,
| and via an Ethereum ERC20 token, BAT) to support creators
| directly yet anonymously.
|
| We will add more over time to support creators, including
| things like patreon and superchats mediated in the browser
| (client side and user first), with privacy and pseudonymity
| as well as anonymity (the default).
| tomrod wrote:
| Seems like there is a lot of mistrust of browsers these
| days. Personally, I like Brave, except that some versions
| on Linux seem to bloat out / crash Fedora.
|
| I think I see your view as to the "why" of Brave -- how
| do you see building user trust at scale?
|
| Another concern that comes to mind: Chrome, Safari are
| backed by companies with massive warchests, and though
| Mozilla is not as far as I know as liquid as GOOG, AAPL,
| it has proven staying power. I'm not sure what the term
| is in the mobile app space when a popular app gets bought
| up and modified, but what guarantees do I have that the
| Brave app won't be bought out by unscrupulous dealers
| down the road?
| SmallPeePeeMan wrote:
| It's my default mobile browser. It does NOT replace ads
| with its own -- this complete nonsense. It blocks ads
| unless you opt-in to see them and the whole Brave Points
| thing is stupid. I've never opted-in.
|
| It is well-known that Firefox and Chrome do their own
| tracking. no extension, ublock or otherwise, can change
| that.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > It is well-known that Firefox and Chrome do their own
| tracking. no extension, ublock or otherwise, can change
| that.
|
| Huh? Firefox has telemetry but the ways to turn it off
| are well documented.
| SmallPeePeeMan wrote:
| Why would I do this:
|
| 1. Research the latest settings I need to change in
| about:config to ensure telemetry & tracking are disabled,
| and privacy settings are optimized (and hope I got them
| all).
|
| 2. Install ublock origin and possibly other privacy-
| related extensions (e.g. to block finger printing)
|
| 3. Do this on every device which I use... I don't know
| about you but I have dozens of devices between myself and
| my family
|
| 4. every time i re-install Firefox or create a new
| Firefox profile, repeat step #1 and #2.
|
| 5. Read the release notes for every Firefox update to
| ensure there aren't new or changed about:config settings
| I should change.
|
| When I can just use Brave instead?
|
| You seriously do all 5 of those steps religiously?
| Because if don't, you're a step or 3 behind Brave's our-
| of-the-box defaults.
| justinmeiners wrote:
| this is an ad
| brendonjohn wrote:
| This is a massive move, I read this as they are hoping to climb
| the value chain and are optimistic about transitioning into a
| company that competes for the the social media advertising
| dollars.
|
| After all, they own their content. Social media companies are
| just linking to it.
|
| I'm going to go out on a limb and say
| https://advertising.nytimes.com/ will be getting a revamp in the
| next eighteen months.
| dirtylowprofile wrote:
| I'm a nytimes subscriber and it would be nice if they were no
| ads.
| noad wrote:
| This is a good step in the right direction, but after we break up
| the tech monopolies we need a new law barring all 3rd party
| tracking, data brokering, and all individually tailored
| advertising.
|
| Even if all those steps were taken it might not be enough to save
| the internet.
| brundolf wrote:
| I mean, this would be enough to get me to whitelist them in my
| adblocker. Same goes for any other sites that do the same
| thing. I feel that's a strong, existing incentive.
| chance_state wrote:
| Probably not as strong as you think. That's some tiny
| fraction of people who are willing to whitelist which is
| another tiny fraction of people who block this stuff to begin
| with.
| brundolf wrote:
| The people blocking ads are quite a large fraction at this
| point. Some smaller publications are shutting down
| completely because ad revenue has dried up. You may be
| right about how many people would bother to whitelist just
| because tracking has been removed, but I bet if they
| included that fact very prominently in their splash pop-up
| it would have a noticeable impact.
|
| For me, at least, I actively feel guilty reading
| publications without ads. I don't want journalism to die.
| But I simply refuse to open myself up to malware and spying
| for the sake of that ideal. If they want to survive, they
| need to take responsibility for what they're shoveling into
| my browser. Otherwise I'll take my basic online safety into
| my own hands.
| hedora wrote:
| If you white list them, they're going to generate a tracking
| profile on you (probably tied to your name and credit card
| company).
|
| Presumably, they'll directly sell this information to third
| parties. Even if not, they'll indirectly share the
| information.
|
| Given that, how many people would actually whitelist them?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we need a new law barring all 3rd party tracking, data
| brokering, and all individually tailored advertising_
|
| Why do we need to ban it? I care about my privacy. I would like
| clear disclosures and easy opt outs. But I don't need it banned
| for everyone else.
| criddell wrote:
| If it isn't going to be banned, how about just making it opt-
| in?
| philliphaydon wrote:
| If a site knows I'm 35 and like computers and uses that to
| advertise to me I'm fine.
|
| What I hate is that I search Agoda without being logged in,
| in an incognito browser. Then I go to Facebook in a different
| browser and it shows me adverts for those hotels I looked. I
| hate my data is shared beyond where I initially put it.
| ardy42 wrote:
| >> we need a new law barring all 3rd party tracking, data
| brokering, and all individually tailored advertising
|
| > Why do we need to ban it? I care about my privacy. I would
| like clear disclosures and easy opt outs. But I don't need it
| banned for everyone else.
|
| Opt-outs aren't practical for the consumer and therefore
| don't work [1]. All that tracking/data brokering needs to be
| banned unless clear disclosures have been made and the
| consumer explicitly opts-in.
|
| [1] I know: years ago I literally spent several _8-hour days_
| opting myself out of just one kind of data broker (scammy
| online people search websites). I _still_ haven 't gotten
| around to doing that for my wife, who is less likely to
| engage in quixotic quests, and sees opting out as a pointless
| waste of time.
| YetAnotherMatt wrote:
| What would you think about a law that makes easy opt-outs
| mandatory, with heavy fines for non-compliance?
| ardy42 wrote:
| > What would you think about a law that makes easy opt-
| outs mandatory, with heavy fines for non-compliance?
|
| Better, but still not good enough. _Finding_ and filling
| out 300 simple forms is still a lot of work and requires
| perfect vigilance. IMHO, opt-out is basically privacy
| theater: make it _theoretically_ possible but
| _practically impossible_.
|
| Any opt-out system that comes anywhere close to being
| effective is just one default-change away from being the
| opt-in system that is should be.
| troydavis wrote:
| CCPA tried to do that by requiring a prominent "Do not
| sell my information" link - and still didn't succeed:
| https://fpf.org/2019/12/19/examining-industry-approaches-
| to-...
|
| A significant minority of the target audience has never
| heard or seen the phrase "opt out." Here's an example
| just how hard it is to explain what's happening and make
| this discoverable, let alone make it easy:
| http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/02/ccpa-comments-
| roun...
| bostik wrote:
| I feel like I must be a broken record, but here goes.
| Frustrated, more than four years ago, I put together a set of
| ground rules for online advertising _I_ would find agreeable.
| It 's fascinating to watch how the online ad ecosystem[ss] has
| evolved since then.
|
| https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html
|
| ss: what do you call an ecosystem formed entirely of parasites?
| chris_wot wrote:
| It's not just a privacy issue. Before Facebook and Google, the
| newspapers and publishers of the world sold their own advertising
| and at a reasonable price.
|
| Now that they rely on Google and Facebook, their ad revenues have
| collapsed. By taking back their own destiny in terms of
| advertising, they can make more revenue.
|
| I consider it a win-win.
| lanewinfield wrote:
| See also: Privacy Chicken
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/21/opinion/priva...
| manigandham wrote:
| The main reason this happened is because cookies are now useless.
|
| 3rd-party data was always rather flimsy and relied entirely on a
| strong identity link. With adblocking, anti-tracking, and privacy
| regulations changing the industry, there's not much accurate 3rd-
| party data left to use.
| shostack wrote:
| They aren't yet, but they are well on their way, particularly
| with the upcoming Chrome cookiepocalypse.
|
| Publishers who want to fortify their businesses have a couple
| things they need to do right now:
|
| * Build their own data moats in the face of platforms like
| Facebook and Google leveraging their own
|
| * Tie audience data to logged-in users, and ensure users are
| constantly logged-in as much as possible. If a user is logged-
| in, cookies are irrelevant.
|
| * Reduce risk from privacy and data legislation. Data is now
| just as much (if not more so) a liability as an asset
|
| * Strengthen their direct and PMP revenue with exclusive
| inventory/targeting/quality
|
| * Reduce reliance on other vendors and platform data
|
| * Reduce reliance on ad revenue (more on that below)
|
| * Grow their brand to associate their inventory with the notion
| of "quality" and help the subscription business
|
| So what we have is a publisher with a subscription product that
| is checking all of these boxes. They are positioned from the
| brand standpoint already, clearly have a valuable audience, and
| the value of their 1st party data will grow over time. Buyers
| who want quality inventory will need to go for direct deals or
| PMPs, or whatever self-serve tool they may roll out at some
| point if they feel they are at that point.
|
| Further, if they can improve the quality or nature of ads
| served, they can actually drive higher revenue from fewer
| impressions. And at a certain point, you can conduct tests and
| research into whether that sufficiently improves the UX so as
| to drive incremental subscription revenue growth (which is
| likely considered more desirable) over what those extra
| impressions could have delivered. That improves the health of
| their subscription business and overall business long-term by
| better aligning their efforts with the interests of their
| paying subscribers, which is a win for them.
|
| If anyone wants to talk shop some more about this, feel free to
| ping me (see profile) as I've dealt with this sort of scenario
| in a professional capacity and could go on for days about this.
| gruez wrote:
| >anti-tracking, and privacy regulations changing the industry
|
| What about fingerprinting? Does CCPA/GDPR cover that?
| soumyadeb wrote:
| Is there any data to show that audience segment based advertising
| works better than content-based advertising?
|
| We can target an audience segment, (say men over 35) and show
| them same advt on all the pages I view. Or we show ads which are
| relevant for the content I am reading right now - if I am reading
| travel stories, show me travel ads.
|
| Is the concern that we won't be able to sell all the inventory
| doing the latter?
| williesleg wrote:
| Who? What?
| eggsnbacon1 wrote:
| The pessimist in me says its because too many users are blocking
| trackers. Going first party means their tracking is unblockable
| turdnagel wrote:
| It's because browsers are starting to block third party
| trackers. Safari's doing it, and Google is planning on blocking
| third party cookies soon.
| konschubert wrote:
| Maybe that's still a step forward?
| eggsnbacon1 wrote:
| Possibly, but my fear is that ad networks will start
| installing frameworks on the content servers and use
| fingerprints instead of cookies for unique user id
| ickwabe wrote:
| It may be able blocking ads or not. But I dont think it's about
| tracking. NYTimes already ran a successful test in Europe where
| they eliminated all third party behavioral based ads and saw no
| revenue drop.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-be-creepy/
|
| I think they have just concluded that the story being told that
| sites must engage in creepy third party ad behavior is false
| and that they can just handle in house.
|
| Overall I think this is probably better.
| nerdponx wrote:
| If this turns out to be as good as it sounds, I might
| actually renew my NYT subscription.
| Medicalidiot wrote:
| I would sometimes read NYT articles during down time at my old
| job. The amount of advertising and JS on the site without and
| adblocker is atrocious. I ended up going to other news sites
| because NYT was so bad. Still, it's nowhere near as bad as
| WaPost.
| dialtone wrote:
| This is just 3rd party data, not 3rd party ads... Nothing to see.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The NYT knows a lot about me, certainly in the realm of what can
| be gathered from my reading habits.
|
| But adNauseam will continue to be running in my browser at all
| times. Do they know? Do they tell their advertisers?
| aaanotherhnfolk wrote:
| My optimistic side hopes that this is so they can do some
| investigative journalism into surveillance capitalism without
| being hypocrites.
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