I’m not talking about Wikipedia or NPR. In fact, I’m talking about “smallish sites”.
Micropayment has been used to facilitate banking fraud, so I can imagine the required security protections are not insubstantial now.
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Are you discussing money-laundering operations?
Microtransactions have for the most part failed. Patreon models seem to be popular enough, at least.
Patreon models seem to be popular enough, at least.
Thanks for the reminder about Patreon which awesome-- I sponsor a handful of people that way. That said, I have like 150 sites in my RSS reader. Even at $1/month that’s going to blow my budget…
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Yes, exactly.
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I asked to use the cart, I never asked to see advertisements. That deal was made between the site owner and the advertisers.
Guilting some of the people into believing we are the problem doesn’t fix the broken system that has been forced on us. It’s petty behavior at this level, but disastrous to humans on a large scale.
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Guilting persons sure has worked well for the print industry.
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I asked to use the cart, I never asked to see advertisements. That deal was made between the site owner and the advertisers.
Yes but do you have a contract, deal, or agreement?
Guilting some of the people into believing we are the problem doesn’t fix the broken system that has been forced on us. It’s petty behavior at this level, but disastrous to humans on a large scale.
Nothing is being forced on you. If you don’t want the ads, leave the site.
It must be nice to be able to reduce everything down to such a simple equation. Goes well with the spreadsheets and TM1 plots, I suppose.
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The site owner needs me. This is not a reasonable solution, just more bullying.
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Goes well with the spreadsheets and TM1 plots, I suppose.
Oh oh, did I just get doxed?
The site owner needs me.
How so?
This is not a reasonable solution, just more bullying.
The bully is the one taking everything they want and giving nothing in return.
You just remind me of a guy in the finance department, is all.
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How profitable is a site with no views?
Calling customers “leeches” doesn’t solve the problem. Driving away readers/commodity won’t solve the problem.
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I don’t need stuff - I want the content. Which is why I bought a t-shirt back in the day and gave it to the shelter as my “subscription fee”.
But Stacksocial and their scammy, spammy crapgear ain’t getting a cent from me.
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How profitable is a site with no views?
More profitable than a site with 1,000,000 views and no revenue.
You solved the riddle… Ban all readers from your website!
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I suspect the management here sometimes wishes that were a viable option!
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I don’t see two wrongs. People here aren’t buying into your argument, no matter how many times you repeat it.
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Delete your argument; it’s flawed.
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You’re pretending that all of the things you just mentioned are non-issues, or easily separable. They are not. Ads ARE attack vectors, AND they mine data and track your activity without consent, AND they are obscene bandwidth hogs, AND the worst offenders can ruin your computer’s performance. The fact that there are many legitimate problems with online ads doesn’t mean we’re reaching for excuses to block them. It’s exactly the opposite. I’ve already said that if ads went back to a model of static banner images and plain text, served from the same domain (or CDN) as the website I’m visiting, which doesn’t track me when I go from site to site, and the website owner took an interest in making sure they weren’t going to be sending me malware or auto-playing video, I would happily uninstall my ad blocker.
The simple fact is that online advertising is broken. Despite advertisers having unprecedented accuracy and precision in the metrics they collect from online ads, they only pay a fraction of a penny per impression. With an average payout of $2.80 for a thousand impressions, $5 would buy you the ability to visit a website almost 1,800 times, yet $5/month seems to be the floor for what sites think is an acceptable “no ads” fee. Web ads either need to pay out amounts more commensurate with their value to advertisers, or websites need to stop pretending that $5 a month is a reasonable offsetting fee for me to view their site without ads.
Ad agencies also need to actually take responsibility for the ads that they serve, and they need to give site owners the ability to precisely select the ads that are served. Right now, site owners have no transparency to audit the ads their ad networks are serving. There is no way to directly and preemptively blacklist a bad ad, and there is no way to see exactly what ads have been served to your site. Every time I’ve ever seen a site owner respond to complaints about bad ads, their response has been “send a screenshot so we can report it to the provider, because we can’t tell what ads are actually going over the wire”. That’s insane. The burden of reporting and policing ad content has been shifted onto individual users, which I hope you’ll agree is ludicrous and absolutely outside the scope of whatever imagined agreement we have with a website when it comes to dealing with their ads. Advertisers also need to be held accountable if they serve malware or misrepresent the content of their ad. Even with the meager tools available to websites for controlling ad loads, ads for adult content or irrelevant services still slip through the filters they’ve set up, because the advertiser simply lied about what the ad was, and there’s no way to audit it before it gets served. There’s seemingly no penalty for engaging in this behavior, so there’s no motivation to stop doing it - in fact, companies that don’t do it are at a disadvantage.
Finally, advertisers need to be firmly told that they do not have the right to stalk me as part of their advertising practices. The online advertising industry’s response to honor-system privacy developments like Do Not Track has essentially been “hah, it’s cute that you think we care”. Their solution - to essentially give you a different tracking cookie that says you shouldn’t be tracked, without any insurance that said cookie will be honored by other agencies (or even the agency you set it with) - is still tracking, and can still be used to follow you around the web. I mean, who’s going to know if they’re going back on their word? What I do online is my business, not theirs, and I shouldn’t be forced to have my entire online life scrutinized just so that Papa Johns can micro-target a $1 off coupon to me because my IP address says that I live on Elm Street in El Paso (I do not actually live on Elm Street in El Paso) and Google knows that I searched for pizza places yesterday.
Ads are a toxic cess pit exemplifying the worst tendencies of the commercial web. Nobody cares about improving them, because the negative impacts are always someone else’s problem to deal with. Website owners blame the ad networks, ad networks blame the advertisers (while continuing to accept their money), and meanwhile we’re still getting served malware and auto-playing videos. Complaining about the situation hasn’t worked. Relying on ad vendors and advertisers to care about the impact their “content” has on users and the websites their ads are wrapped around hasn’t worked. The only way we as users have to express discontent with the system is to block it, because practically every website utilizes the same ad platforms, and all of them - even Google’s - are rife with abusive behavior. There are so few safe harbors anymore that “just don’t visit the site” is an impracticality. If we wanted to avoid dealing with noxious ads that way, we’d basically have to stop visiting most of the web.
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