So that’s what they’re called? Makes sense.
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Finish playing the ad…then crash the video app.
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And wants to use location services.
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Hide your company’s operating hours, address, and telephone number somewhere deep. Be certain to set the page with such information to “noindex.”
FTFY.
ETA (thanks @jandrese) :
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I wonder how many visitors say yes to notifications and location services.
I also wonder what percentage of the visitors install the app when prompted.
Because… if these visitors make a sizeable part of your user base and, presumably, also make a sizeable portion of your revenue, eventually it will make no business sense to serve the others. Those who value their privacy enough that they don’t let you invade their personal device and read its data like an open book.
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AFAIK, “dickbars” was coined by John Gruber, specifically for bars at the bottom of the screen that stay on top of the web content you are trying to read. He might have talked about it on Twitter first, but this post is the best canonical source:
ETA:
Don’t forget this one as well:
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Once you’ve eliminated all the people who click away the moment they see that crap, and then add in the 90% of people who clicked the links because they fat-fingered the miniscule close pixel…
All modern SEO and “engagement” are based on the same principles as FTP web games and one simple trick videos: first get rid of anyone with two or more brain cells, now we have a target market we understand.
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No the target market they understand, but the target market which brings revenue. And why would they serve any other market?
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When the visitor is using Firefox on Linux, put up a dickbar that says “You are using an unsupported browser version. Click here to learn more.” and then recommend, among other browsers, Firefox!
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OK. Maybe I can summarize modern web design:
The money is in the users who install the app, accept notifications and like your site on Facebook. Annoy the crap out of the others. You don’t need them.
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Inspired by a previous post on sticky headers (dickbars), I made a chrome extension that provides a button to kill all fixed and sticky CSS elements:
Might be useful for someone else.
I couldn’t get the bookmarklet to fire using any existing extensions on the chrome store, and this one catches ones that have the “sticky” tag.
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Then why are they all going broke?
Those tricks work for games and sales videos because you are hunting whales that you can milk directly, to mix a few metaphors. For “content” sites they live on conversions. What the SEO grifters sell you is conversion percentages, even as your page views plummet.
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Maybe because there is no valid business model for sites like Medium? Or do you think they would get less broke by dedicating more ressources to the users you don’t bring in revenue?
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On mobile, Unobstruct is an IOS app that removes dick bars automatically. Not sure if there’s an Android equivalent.
On the desktop, there’s a browser extension for that, unstickall:
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Metrics ≠ revenue, but you will never convince a modern ad or marketing company of that. After all, metrics, not revenue, are what they are expected to present to their clients (ad buyers). “Ad-support” as a business model is generally in a death spiral, and traditional media enterprises (like Medium) are now caught in the faustian bargain they made over a century ago.
I visit lots of sites who have it figured out (this is one!). Income diversification is important, but increasingly convincing your customers to pay you for things you give them (insanity!) is defining the winners vs. the losers, at least in the media I follow. Initially a lot of companies have done this as stupidly as they could (NYT), charging print media prices for crippled site access, but other companies are figuring it out.
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This is something I hate because I prefer to keep libs to a minimum for my own sanity but when everyone keeps demanding that our site look like a native iOS app it just makes it a necessity to do what the project owners demand (looks over substance). So we smother the app in UI libs that no one wants or needs. It’s not like we’re making the website so sparse that you have to know CLI commands to use it.
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One last relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/773/
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There’s something tragically insecure about the sites that pop a box up the moment that you move the mouse off the main area of the browser. “Please god, don’t leave me here alone! No one ever visits except web spiders!”
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Don’t forget to pop-up a request to take a survey the very first time someone loads a page on your site.
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