

The relentless (and annoying) pursuit of eyeballs - srikar
http://kensegall.com/2014/07/the-relentless-and-annoying-pursuit-of-eyeballs/

======
snide
I've worked on 5-6 high traffic content sites in my 15 year career. The
problem with Internet advertising is likely the part that people first loved
about it: immediate analytics.

Here's the problem. When every action you get paid for is a metric, it forces
those metrics to eventually be corrupted. Need CPM eyeballs? We solved that
one decades ago... link rings. Today's link ring is outbrain, nrelate and the
rest. Here, we'll put web sugar on our pages with bikinis and top 10 lists.
Eyeballs you have. Doesn't matter that the site sells itself as a tech
magazine, it's real traffic is comic con photos of Jean Grey. No one will
know.

Maybe you get paid for clicks. OK. We have solutions for that too. Let's put
adwords in the page. Let's style them to look like navigation. Let's create
popovers with super tiny close buttons that purposefully have their display
and href off by a few pixels. Let's delay it to load so that we can likely
grab a rogue accidental click as well. Smaller screen, less precision as you
do in mobile? Perfect, even better. We'll autoplay movies one after the other,
but only if we have an ad. There's a system to all of this.

Then of course you run into the engineers and executives that simply don't
care. The Internet to them isn't the democratization of knowledge, it's an
opportunity. "People want to click on Bikinis, why do you care". The problem
of course is ads become a pattern. Once one large site falls into selling a
certain system, the rest fall like dominos. Because the ad providers aren't
going to create unique ads per site.

Meanwhile I was building very genuine, audience driven sites that were doing a
hundreds of thousands of people a day. Mostly, believe it or not, DIRECT
traffic. It doesn't matter. You can't compete with 10s of millions from link
arbitrage, 99% referral traffic. You're not a big site. You don't matter. Sure
we'd get hundreds of real comments and discussion per story, but there's only
three-hundred thousand people on the site, who cares.

The problem of course is this is just as big a problem for the content
producers themselves. They go to work day to day and get beaten over the head
to make cheap, quick content that attracts the most viewers. The shotgun
approach, something will hit. For the first couple years they fight it out,
but eventually they give up too. It's easy.

There are companies solely dedicated to this. They create cheap content with
little or no value, a getty image subscription, and siphon links from larger,
less valuable networks like yahoo and aol. They pay 1 cent for the link and
charge 2 for the ad. These quick, pop-up sites feature some sort of vertical
branding (cars, babies...etc) and sell their growth to unknowlegable ad-
buyers. Look, we're a brand new car site that's getting 2 million uniques a
day!

It's depresses me sometimes. It was hard to work around that kind of scam and
not dip to those levels. The pressure is always immense. If you just use such
and such dark pattern, you can solve all your problems.

I really hope things like Patreon work out. I'd love to see people paying for
smart content. It's needs to be easier than it is.

It's of course not all bad. On the positive, small scale publishing by the
individual is as healthy as ever. A good quarter of the links you'll read on
this page today are on somebody's blog, containing no ads and featuring real,
genuine ideas and knowledge.

~~~
eevilspock
Love all the examples you provide. Would love to combine your knowledge with
mine
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8057629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8057629))
and others who have more to say on this and publish a well written case.

As to alternatives to ad revenue, what are your thoughts on approaches like
Patreon vs web micropayments or this idea of mine
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009959))?

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m52go
The problem is that the default price of consumption on the internet has
become FREE.

Just because the price to transmit content on the internet is negligible,
doesn't mean the price to PRODUCE it is also negligible.

It's one of the most severe problems with the internet...its default business
model isn't realistic.

~~~
eevilspock
I agree, but it's an absolute fallacy that consumption is free. In fact, it is
more much more expensive with ads:

1\. The advertisers who pay for it all still get their money from us, but
baked into prices of the things we buy from them. There is no free lunch.

2\. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too. Ad
systems and data collection systems, ad engineers and people like the author.
Ad agencies. Creative agencies. Ad tracking. Marketing departments.

3\. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first
because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want (what we want
only indirectly and secondarily, if at all). This includes both the cost of
lost privacy as well as well as design that optimizes advertising revenue. As
has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.

4\. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make
voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising is
predominantly about manipulation and deceit. To me this is the most expensive
cost of all.

Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web content and services
than if we could just straight up pay web sites for straight-up ad-free
versions. A system to make that convenient is possible, but we're too hooked
on ads to even try.

[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that
I made here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773)]

 _" Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our
favorite sites wouldn’t exist without it."_

The author nails the two sources of the problem, that advertising drives the
internet, and that everyone believes we have no choice.

~~~
RodericDay
This is a fantastic post, and nails down one of the most frustrating
contradictions I encounter online: People whose salaries are ultimately paid
by advertisers complaining about low income people making self-sabotaging
decisions.

Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically
coercion. If it pays for things we love it's because we're indirectly paying
for them + the advertising industry.

~~~
tomjen3
Either advertising works or it doesn't. Insofar it works, it's basically
coercion

Not even close. An ad can make a decent amount of money if it does one of
three things: show me a new place where I can get a need that I have solved,
or show me a solution to a problem or need that I know I have that didn't know
had a solution or, and this is the most tangential and the one that is most
difficult to do - shows me a need or a problem I didn't know I had and a
solution to that (this is what people often complain about as superficial, but
if I see a sign saying "most people pay more tax than they have to, lets us do
your taxes and save" that might get me thinking).

There is no coercion there, the information itself is valuable to me and the
advertiser.

The trouble with most ads, and the reason people think they suck in general,
is that most of them are for crappy products because crappy products, in
general, need more advertising. Great products need advertising too but not so
much.

~~~
eevilspock
You're right in principle but not in practice, as you yourself point out in
your final paragraph.

How are users supposed to know which ads are honest, and which ads are crappy
products spun as great? And if crappy products far outnumber quality ones
(case in point, how much of the content on the web do you think is garbage?),
how does advertising achieve what you claim in your second paragraph?

And even for those non-crappy products, how much incentive is there for
sellers to tell half-truths to increase sales? "Here is my great product (but
I won't tell you about this other better or cheaper product that I know about,
and in fact, I'm buying this ad to make sure that that upstart competitor
never even has a chance! It's so nice that my established market dominance
pays for my wide and deep advertising mote!)"

See this thread for more on this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733941)

------
egypturnash
The Patreon campaign for my ongoing web comic[1] hit a milestone this week.
I'd promised that when I hit $50/page, I'd turn off the ads. Now they're gone.
No distractions, just the comic, and a polite note at the end of every few
chapters asking people to consider supporting me on Patreon, buying some
stuff, or telling their friends about the comic.

I dunno if this model is sustainable in the long run; if nobody has ads I'm
not sure how I'd have gotten eyeballs on my comic in the first place. It's not
something that's dripping with viral shareability; it's a dense, long-form
work best consumed in chapter-sized chunks. And I've still got a ways to go
before it's paying my rent. But it's working for me right here, right now.

1: [http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/](http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/)

------
coder23
Try this if you have a windows machine.

[http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt](http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt)

I have yet to see some a video advertisement on any site, and text ones are
almost nonexistent on popular websites.

------
tomjen3
Most online ads are just for bad or useless products. Why would I ever want to
buy a Win8 phone? Iphone or Android I get, maybe even a dumb phone when I run
out of power, but a Win 8?

Even Facebook, which already has so many of my private details, can't show me
better ads than for a fifth-rate dating site and and Iphone cover from some
China Export service.

Of course when you make an ad jump around in front of people, they will try to
find a way to get rid of it, so they might click on it by accident - and so
you get a bit higher click-throughs.

We are reaching a point where there just aren't enough good products to
satisfy the demand for ad inventory (at least at the given price) and so they
have to get worse and worse products that can only afford it if they use
crappy and annoying ads.

