"we need to monetize our site more" - proceeds to ruin the experience of the site, driving customers to adblocking technologies, reducing engagements
because adblocking applies to all sites, more sites push more and more intrusive ads, pushing the creation and use of more adblocking technologies.
rinse and repeat until the internet is literally unusable without pihole, uBlock, a good VPN, and a browser that isn't owned google or microsoft.
if real life had advertisements like the internet, we'd have advertisements painted onto the wall of apartments and landlords would get mad at us we cover it up with paint and art.
What makes me wonder is whether it is efficient. Very certainly, there are people who want to rain ads on you from every direction, even when you carry an umbrella and wear Wellington boots.
But does this actually increase the sales of the products being so advertised? Is there a measurable effect? What kind of businesses see uptick in sales, and how real / scammy they are? Does it work in general, or only by hitting some especially gullible individuals, like "Nigerian spam" does? Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments?
I'd also note that not all ads are repulsive. It's mostly the obnoxiously intrusive ones that ruin it. Back in the day Google won a fortune by offering textual ads, that were unobtrusive and lightweight, so users did not jump.to block them, unlike the banner ads of the era. The minimal text ads are still there BTW, but now they seem to load heavyweight and more intrusive pieces of JS :(
> Is there a measurable effect? What kind of businesses see uptick in sales, and how real / scammy they are?
There are plenty of mismatched incentives in the advertising supply chain making it so that very few of the parties involved actually care about an uptick in sales.
You have the marketing department in the company, who gets allocated a certain budget. Their objective is to spend the budget (otherwise they'd get less next time) and find a way to convince their boss that it led to good results so they can justify their own salary/promotion/etc. Sales is a difficult thing to obtain (let alone attribute), but there's this magical thing called "engagement". You can pull it out of thin air.
The marketing/ad agency they hired needs to justify their fee. Again, sales are a difficult thing to obtain (for a start, the product needs to be good and useful to the purchaser) let alone attribute. But again, your objective isn't really sales when you can just show "engagement" and let someone else find an excuse as to how this relates to sales, if any.
The advertising platform is happy to take their money and send (or outright make up) "engagement" their way. They don't care how real or intentional this engagement is. Someone trying to dismiss an obnoxious cookie banner and clicking the ad by mistake? Great! Obnoxious lockscreen ad and person thinks they have to tap the ad to unlock the phone (this is real - I've seen it)? Sure thing!
The websites in turn are paid per click they refer to the advertising platform and don't care about how real/intentional those clicks are either, so placing the ads in inconvenient places where they're likely to attract unintentional clicks is in their interest.
At every layer someone skims some money off the top so everyone is happy to look the other way, and nobody is interested in exploring other approaches (such as a marketplace model where users who intend to buy something can search through ads) because such a model, even if it turns out more efficient in connecting sellers & customers, will eliminate the need for these middlemen which is an obvious problem for them.
> The websites in turn are paid per click they refer to the advertising platform and don't care about how real/intentional those clicks are either, so placing the ads in inconvenient places where they're likely to attract unintentional clicks is in their interest.
Of my maybe 20 ad clicks in the last 10 years, about 19 have been accidental clicks on moving banners on the phone. (Made up guesstimate numbers).
But I had this other revelation. I have a 4yo son, that every now and then sneak up on my wife's Windows computer and clicks every obnoxious embedded Windows' ad he sees until he get to some game he likes. He can end up with like 60 tabs.
Like. How much of ad engagements are really from kids that can't even read? I've seen toddlers click ads on parents phones a lot. The moving ads with pretty colors, might not really be a good ad for the advertiser but just kids pressing the obvious thing to press.
(I've since taken measures to protect him from Windows. Don't worry.)
I've been working in the difital advertising space for >14 years, and I'll second Nextgrid's comment.
>Is it a ruse to oversell ads to gullible business owners, maybe with some help of complicit marketing departments?
Absolutely. That's the dirty secret at the heart of online advertising.
The advertisers are unsophisticated, so there is a staggering amount of fraud taking place. Advertisers have no way / have no interest in checking which sites end up serving their ads, so you get situations where large firms are bankrolling extremist sites [1] (Nandini Jammi does a lot of work to expose how this works)
Because advertising networks are either sketchy or cartelized (search for "project Jedi Blue"), middlemen also skim ~50% of ad spend before it reaches publishers.[2]
But, ads do work. They just work on the portion of the population that is not savvy enough to use adblockers, or wealthy enough to pay for ad-free "Premium". And it is a dwindling group.
It works. I have a friend who works for a small but stable independent company selling a consumer goods ( imagine 10 people selling hats online). 90+% of their revenue depends on marketing. Almost nobody goes to "coolhats.com" to see if there is a sale, and nobody stops by to casually browse hats and see if there is something interesting.
Instead, you have to put a cool hat in front of someone on facebook or reddit and show them. Ideally someone who recently conducted a related keyword search or has otherwise been profiled as a likely buyer.
100%. HN users will sit here and tell you all day long ads don’t work, having worked ad’s adjacent, I can assure you, they do. I do contract work for a bunch of ecommerce customers and for everyone one of them AdWords is 95+ percent of their traffic and sales.
Do they “work” because they’re actually effective, or do they “work” due to being in so many places, that it’s basically inevitable that you end up in some conversion pipeline.
If someone searches for “your_site.com” and the top 3 results are: an ad for “your_site”, “a competitor” and then the link to your site, and someone clicks the ad, and purchases something, that conversion will 100% look like the ad worked, but realistically the user was going to your site anyways.
Since you mentioned Facebook, I find their ads most precisely targeted (seeing as a target audience member regularly presented with relevant ads). They are also not obnoxious, even though not very modest either.
Sadly, many websites and ad networks do a much worse job, which, to my mind, should produce infuriation and make a negative brand image, rather than awareness and sales.
In a similar vein, Instagram was the first platform where I actually took a pause and realized someone had actually figured out how to give me appealing advertising over the internet. I don't use Facebook to know how they differ, it may be practically identical.
My experience is that I use my Instagram account not to interact with my social group but to engage with content I like (primarily art content like sculpture, painting, light/projection, music, etc). It's actually a really pleasant experience and I'm doing my best to protect my groove in the recommendation algorithm. I basically get an effortless feed of art events in my area without me needing to subscribe to a newsletter. And it also engages me with a lot of independent artists selling unique items that I like.
I'd like a company to test out offering a separate tab of 'sponsored links' related to a list of search results. That would provide an advantage to advertisers as they are only charged for views when a person chooses to look at the ads (presumably because they are a more likely customer.) It would benefit users by giving them more actual search results and the choice to see ads, which should benefit the company taking this approach.
> if real life had advertisements like the internet, we'd have advertisements painted onto the wall of apartments and landlords would get mad at us we cover it up with paint and art.
Not to be pedantic but doesn't Google technically own Microsoft's browser? I agree with you though, we've all been pushed to this point and I just wonder if there's any going back - and how?
I hate to say this but it feels like the more people got on the internet, the worse it got. Not their fault, but it's akin to a really good neighborhood market. It doesn't just attract honest shoppers but pickpockets and thieves too. Now we're all stuck in a crowded and increasingly crappy market wondering what happened to our beloved neighborhood hangout.
If we're being pedantic, then no. Google has made the core of Edge, but doesn't own Edge itself. Just like how Epic doesn't own every game made with Unreal.
I do wish that uBlock Origin had a opt-in mode per domain. I would disable blocking by default and only enable it on sites that were particularly obnoxious. This would in theory incentive sites to actually have reasonable ads (because they get some rather than no revenue).
IIRC Adguard? Ad-Bloc? Whoever the OG ad-block extension was tried something similar to this and I believe it was the cause of their downfall. Basically they struck a deal with advertisers to let some ads through that were deemed mild. The backlash was immense.
Here is the core problem, and I promise you this is true.
Most sites want to maximize ad-revenue. Most users don't want to see a single ad anywhere.
What killed it was not the deal. The deal divided the uses into a group that abandoned it, and a group that decided to support it.
The author then decided to take money to not block the mild advertisers. Then he stopped blocking worse and worse ads. At some point at the last step, enough people left that he stopped developing and sold the extension.
and then, the buyer decided to use the extension to gather user data to sell to advertisers. At this point it still had enough users to be worthwhile.
> Most users don't want to see a single ad anywhere.
I don't actually mind seeing ads. I actually long for magazine ads. It was (mostly) obvious they were ads, they had to actually advertise a thing, and they didn't try to take me outside of the magazine. There was also a strong correlation between the type of content in the magazine and the ads themselves. Some ads were very creative or visually appealing so the point I still remember them years and decades later.
What I do mind is advertisements trying to pull me away from the content I'm currently reading, tracking me all over the web, and showing me ads based on their tracking rather than related to the content I'm reading. I don't want a fucking video overlayed on a text article I'm trying to read. I don't want to be tracked everywhere on the web. If a site collects data about me, especially data I enter willingly into their system, I want a say in the governance of that data.
The major problem I see with modern web advertising is a lack of informed consent. Just throwing up a boilerplate "we'll share with partners" is not sufficient for me to make an informed decision to consent to data collection. People can't make informed choices and that data sharing with partners means they're sharing that information with their partners and so on. All of that transitive sharing is done without express consent by the end users.
It's not the ad I'm opposed to seeing but all of the bullshit behind the ad I can't see.
Well it has opt-out so you can turn it off to support a site. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a toggle somewhere to reverse the behaviour.
But I personally never make an exception for anything ever. So I'm really happy with the default. I do pay a subscription to a few sites but I would never allow ads, even when they are tracking-free.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it has a toggle somewhere to reverse the behaviour.
I checked and I'm pretty confident it doesn't. There are lots of people asking for this feature and the conclusion says that allow by default and opt-in to blocking isn't available.
"we need to monetize our site more" - proceeds to ruin the experience of the site, driving customers to adblocking technologies, reducing engagements
because adblocking applies to all sites, more sites push more and more intrusive ads, pushing the creation and use of more adblocking technologies.
rinse and repeat until the internet is literally unusable without pihole, uBlock, a good VPN, and a browser that isn't owned google or microsoft.
if real life had advertisements like the internet, we'd have advertisements painted onto the wall of apartments and landlords would get mad at us we cover it up with paint and art.