
A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic - luu
http://www.gwern.net/Ads
======
buro9
What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that:

1\. Banners hurt unless they are relevant

2\. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather
than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers

3\. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every
metric

4\. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re-
writing existing links rather than inserting awful links on a word match
basis)

That last one is what I now do. Is it as profitable as running banners
everywhere? No. But it is the highest possible engagement with some revenue,
and if one focuses energy on reducing costs instead it can work well.

~~~
badestrand
Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with
revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own
sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to
support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.

~~~
dangrossman
It wouldn't work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that
subscription would have to be in excess of $100/month per household, and you'd
need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The
amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all
revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can't replace that
with some $10/month subscription even if everyone paid it.

~~~
viraptor
Something's not right with that equation. You're implying that on average,
each household is spending over $1000 per month on things they get via the
online advertising that they would otherwise not get at all.

And that's just not realistic. One-off purchases, maybe. Sustained 1k/hh/mth
avg - I'd love to see a proof of that.

~~~
dredmorbius
Total advertising spend worldwide is $600 billion. Online is about 1/6 of
that, call it $100 billion.

To a rough approximation, that's footed by the 1 billion wealthy inhabitants
of the EU, US, Japan, Canada, Australian, and New Zealand. (I said _rough_ ,
roll with me.)

That means that the _per person_ costs of advertising are pretty much $100
annually online and $600 annually for all content (mostly TV). Keep in mind,
_those are real expenses_ expressed through household purchases.

(This means, by the way, that online content isn't free, you _are_ paying for
it, only, you're doing so indirectly, through advertisers.)

By contrast, total direct expenditures on print media run about $125/person in
the US. (Audio/video may add to that.)

If you look at _what_ is advertised, an awful lot is very high-ticket items.
The FIRE industries (finance, insurance, real estate) were the largest chunk
of spend as of a couple-three years ago. Electronics is another large segment.

The notion of some sort of universal content payments scheme, preferably
indexed to wealth and income, has a great deal of economic justification. I've
been exploring that for the past few years.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+cont...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+content+syndication&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all)

~~~
Zpalmtree
So, if I block advertising, I'm indirectly wasting the money these companies
spend on me, and are paying more for products without any benefit? That's a
funny thought.

~~~
dredmorbius
You're also avoiding the inherent manipulation of advertising itself.

But yes, the dynamics are a tad bent.

------
katzgrau
As someone who has founded and runs an adserver for a living (we deal only
with legitimate publications, nothing sketchy), I found this thought
provoking.

Since I deal mostly in niche/local advertising, I might have a unique
perspective. It turns out that the more relatable a banner ad is, the less
offended the reader is.

That may sound obvious, and it probably is. But the general effect is that
users engage with and are sometimes genuinely interested in banner ads for
their favorite restaurants, venues, and other spots. Local and niche
advertisers are part of the community. A Ford or Chevy ad is generally much
less relatable.

So my overall point is that the nature of the publication and its advertising
clients is going to impact whether some readers are turned off - so it's
difficult to derive a rule of thumb for banner advertising as a whole.

~~~
badrabbit
As a user,I am most offended by ads that target me. I would rather see a
completely unrelatable ad. It feels like learning new information that way,as
opposed to being stalked and preyed upon.

~~~
tikhonj
The other option is to target the ads _to the publication_. As long as the
publication is on a niche topic or geographically localized, you can choose
ads that will likely interest people (local restaurants) without needing to
track them. Tracking is only necessary when the ad venue is incredibly broad
across topics and geography.

~~~
Feniks
That's how old media has been doing it for centuries. But media is hard: you
have to invest in personal relations with advertisers.

New media just outsources all the hard work to Google and other big ad
placers. Easier but you lose editorial control over your work.

~~~
ar0
In fact, that’s how Google started out with AdSense as well: It was called
“content targeting advertising”, because Google scanned your webpage and then
served ads that related to the content of your webpage.

I don’t know what happened along the road to lead us to the current tracking
and spying mess.

~~~
shostack
What happened is the ad landscape shifted from targeting placements and
content to targeting audiences and where they are in their journey to
purchase. It simply performs better for advertisers and it's often more
scalable. In turn, this makes the platform more money because sites that may
have low value inventory can suddenly be sold for higher CPMs if an advertiser
for example wants to bid on their retargeting data in the auction. It let's
them price based on people.

------
gallerdude
I used to roll my eyes every time I saw someone on HN talk about "signal to
noise ratio," but I'm getting more and more swayed. Humans deal in
abstractions: more clean an abstraction is, the more we can hold onto it.

So when I read a ~10% difference in traffic, I'm not surprised. Art, in
absolutely any form, is always about focusing on your theme. And ads, by their
very nature, blur that focus.

------
dfabulich
The author's approach to estimating the value of traffic, even by subjective
criteria, strikes me as puzzling, somewhat arbitrarily valuing ad-free page
views at $0.02, despite the fact that they generate no direct revenue.

> _My website is important to me because it is what I have accomplished & is
> my livelihood, and if people are not reading it, that is bad. How bad? In
> lieu of advertising it’s hard to directly quantify the value of a page-view,
> so I can instead ask myself hypothetically, would I trade ~1 week of traffic
> for $360 (~$0.02/view, or to put it the other way, $18720/year)? Probably;
> that’s about the right number - with my current parlous income, I cannot
> casually throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars for some additional
> traffic and so I feel comfortable valuing page-views at ~$0.02 or a bit
> less._

If your income is as parlous as you say, then it seems bizarre to value any
amount of unmonetized traffic over cash flow.

People call page views a "vanity metric" with good reason. You can't put food
on your plate with page views. By valuing a single page view at $0.02, you're
literally doing work for free, "for exposure."

We all make fun of businesses who ask professionals to work for $0 for
exposure. It's no better when you're making _yourself_ work for unfair terms!

To put this another way, I think the author can probably arrange to _buy_
relevant traffic via Google AdWords at or less than $0.02 per page view. If
traffic ("exposure") is that valuable, then, yes, stop running ads on your
site, and instead buy ads of your own.

But if that sounds outrageous to you, if you would never reach into your
pocket to pay Google $360 for a week's worth of website traffic, then you
should rethink whether unmonetized page views are really as valuable as you
think they are.

~~~
gwern
One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands
of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money,
the remaining money becomes much more valuable...

> it seems bizarre to value any amount of ad-free traffic over cash flow.

Also, while I do not know for certain how much each page-view is worth, I do
know for certain that it is not exactly _$0_! Errors made on the assumption it
is a cent or two are surely less than errors made on the assumption it is
literally worthless.

(As it happens, the introspection was pointless because the effect came
nowhere near the threshold, and if it had, I would've had to reintrospect
anyway since my Patreon has been working better and I have more money since I
began the A/B test in January. There's no reason to not revisit thresholds if
circumstances have changed, after all.)

~~~
dfabulich
> _One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend
> thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have
> less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable..._

If you have very little money, then every cent counts, including AdSense
cents. Page views count only to the extent that they convert into something:
Patreon patrons, consulting gigs, or what have you.

And I'm not saying your page views convert at $0 to those things, but I think
it's plausible that you're off by an order of magnitude, e.g. that an ad-free
page view is worth only a tenth of a cent.

------
soared
I honestly couldn't follow most of the math but found this really interesting.
I used to do UX analyses at a marketing agency and would constantly link
clients to [1]. Page speed is huge, especially on desktop where its easier to
navigate away. OP mentions this, but I imagine the effect is massive on a site
where users are actively researching a topic and have tens of tabs open and so
can easily switch to a similar website.

I do think this test could have been done without banner ads involved. Looking
at page load speed per user and how that effects traffic would likely have the
same results.

From my link below:

> A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in
> conversions.

[1] [https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-
time/](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/)

~~~
mattmanser
In my experience that kissmetrics blog is a load of nonsense in practice.

We massively reduced load time on the all the key pages from 4 secs to roughly
<400 ms avg. No 25% bump in sales for us. At the time the client sold about
50-80 things a day on thousands of daily visits. A month later, they sold
about 50-80 things a day. This was a fairly standard website similar to
booking.com or any search/book site, basically location aware searches with a
landing page for each venue and a "book" CTA.

I did a similar thing with their mobile site a year or two later, massively
reducing the page-weight and reducing loading times on the devices I tested
from seconds to again sub-second load times. Again no discernible bump.

~~~
icelancer
Right - the pageload time only matters for certain sectors. We sell sports
science equipment and our competitors have 10s load times; I'm sure they have
no issue selling their stuff. If they got their load times down to ~1s I bet
they'd sell more... but not that much more. We are in the 1.5s-2.0s load time
and I'm happy with that; given we use Woocommerce to drive our traffic I
highly, highly doubt I can get it much lower given our current site design
which does very well engagement-wise. That's fine for us; our conversion
metrics and related analytics show that we're doing very well for our
industry.

For niche equipment you're either gonna buy it or you aren't. If it isn't
Amazon, Google, Wal-Mart, or places where you are preying on impulse buys
(Woot, LowEndBox/VPS, etc), then the page load times matter a hell of a lot
less than something like user design.

------
HugThem
He seems to not show _how_ the ads looked like on his page. He seems to only
attribute it to load time. But maybe the ads were visually annoying? Why no
screenshots?

~~~
gwern
I have adblock so I don't usually see them and didn't make a point of
screenshotting them. When I did (usually checking in Chromium that some CSS
change was working), they were fairly ordinary AdSense ads, IMO. Like on DNB
FAQ, they would usually be Lumosity or college ads. They weren't flashing or
visually offensive, so I never saw them as a problem.

~~~
HugThem
I looked at some of your pages on archive.org but saw no ads either. Can you
give me a hint how to find the pages with the ads?

~~~
gwern
It was on almost all of the HTML pages (except the index & Modafinil) up to
September. Perhaps the JS doesn't run when loaded from IA or something?

~~~
HugThem
Good question. Even if it does not load, it should still show the adsense code
in the html. But looking at some random post, I don't see it:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20150304235943/http://www.gwern.n...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150304235943/http://www.gwern.net/Haskell%20Summer%20of%20Code)

Adsense is usually a script loaded from googlesyndication.com which is not in
the source here.

Maybe archive.org rewrote the html so much that it is not there anymore?

~~~
figgis
After a few moments of searching I'm going to assume that whoever specifically
scraped and uploaded the page may have removed the adsense javascript. Doesn't
look to be a normal archive.org thing.

~~~
HugThem
You can upload pages to archive.org? Wouldn't that open the door for spam and
other abuse?

I checked some other site and the Adsense code is not changed by archive.org.
So something _is_ strange.

Maybe Gwern experimented with different types of ads and on that page at that
time did not use adsense?

I _do_ see the adsense code in a snapshot from a year later:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20160629230243/https://www.gwern....](http://web.archive.org/web/20160629230243/https://www.gwern.net/Haskell%20Summer%20of%20Code)

------
magicmikexxl
There are ways to have comments that are a lot less awful than Disqus.

~~~
pault
I don't like Disqus mostly because the UX is clunky. Are there other things
people dislike about it?

~~~
Freak_NL
Being tracked by a single third party on every site that uses it comes to
mind.

------
dooglius
The content is characterized as "highly technical longform static content in a
minimalist layout optimized for fast loading & rendering catering to
Anglophone STEM-types in the USA", which is definitely true, but I think
there's an important subset not mentioned. According to
[http://www.gwern.net/](http://www.gwern.net/) the most popular three articles
on the site are about darknet drug markets, and #4 and #5 are reviews of
specific controlled substances in the US. I don't know what the ads for these
pages looked like, but here's an example from a Google search for "modafinil"
in incognito mode with my adblocker turned off:
[https://i.imgur.com/3dRssOy.png](https://i.imgur.com/3dRssOy.png) ["the silk
road" and "lsd microdosing" didn't turn up any ads, but it's possible Google
does more filtering on its own site than on others... I couldn't easily find
any LSD review sites that used AdSense for a fair comparison]

If I saw an ad like that in a banner at the top of the page, it's going to
cause an immediate, visceral reaction: the site is sketchy, maybe trying to
scam me, and any content is going to have a big conflict of interest. To be
fair, since I use an ad-blocker, I'm probably more ad-sensitive than the
sample set... but who hasn't gotten their fair share of similar email spam
before?

The CSVs don't have page information, unfortunately, but I'd expect most of
the harmful effect comes from the drug-related pages.

~~~
gwern
The modafinil page didn't have AdSense during the experiment, and if it had, I
think the content would have not involved modafinil; Google was burned badly
years ago by mega-fines for allowing greymarket pharmacies to advertise and I
assume it's totally filtered them out, so any served ads would be targeted at
other personal characteristics, presumably. (I also vaguely recollect trying
to buy some adwords once while experimenting with advertising gwern.net pages,
and the drug categories being totally out of bounds.)

During the experiment, roughly, the most popular pages were a mix:
[https://www.gwern.net/About#january-2017---
july-2017](https://www.gwern.net/About#january-2017---july-2017) The top 5
were modafinil (excluded from AdSense), spaced repetition (psychology), LSD
microdosing, DNB FAQ (also psychology), and "Story Of Your Life"
(physics/literary criticism).

------
Ruud-v-A
I am curious, what constitutes “traffic”, and if it is page loads, why is it
the right thing to measure? Users who load the page are already visiting,
regardless of whether there is an ad on the page or not. (Or does it include a
delay to filter visitors who immediately close the page?) And they did not
know in advance whether there was going to be an ad, so their decision to
visit the site is not based on the presence of ads. (Unless perhaps if they
had a particularly bad experience a previous time — bad enough to remember the
domain and not follow the link.) I don’t understand how turning ads on and off
every two days can be used to understand long-term effects. There appears to
be the assumption that there is a relation between a user seeing an ad or not,
and subsequent traffic. There might be a small correlation because of visitors
browsing the site, or likeliness to share, but if outside of the spikes, the
majority of visitors arrive from an old external link or search engine, and
they only read a single page, then how does turning ads on and off every two
days measure impact on these users?

~~~
eof
It is probably a combination of performance impact, lower page views per
visit, and lower return rate.

------
imh
What do you think the mechanism is on the connection between ads and
pageviews? Or the mechanism for the autocorrelation of pageviews? Have you
been able connect the dots on something like sharing to sites like HN?

~~~
gwern
> What do you think the mechanism is on the connection between ads and
> pageviews?

The mechanism that makes the most sense to me is via influence in social media
resharing. This requires affecting only a few people (power users/the '1%')
but can plausibly deliver the necessary effect size. The logical next step in
the analysis would be to go back into Google Analytics and pull out another
set of time-series and try to split between search engine, direct, and
referrals; the decrease _should_ be concentrated as search engine < direct <
referrals. I'm not looking forward to figuring out how to code that up as a
time-series model, though...

> Or the mechanism for the autocorrelation of pageviews?

Well, some of the mechanisms there are obvious just from the referring URLs.
Many people don't read HN via the front page, they use a third-party interface
or a daily newsletter; so while OP is getting substantial traffic today, it'll
also get traffic tomorrow from people catching up with today's 'best of HN'
etc. And from HN it gets auto-posted to Twiter, and of course many people will
only see the tweets later when they log into Twitter the next morning or
evening. Then you have timezones - perhaps someone is asleep now even if they
do read the HN frontpage directly. It might get included in blogger link
roundups or sites like The Browser weeks or months from now - more
autocorrelation. What about search engines? They'll notice, and will update.
No one has mentioned any comparable experiments so right now my A/B test
appears to be _sui generis_, so people debating the costs and benefits of
advertising might link it over the next few months. And so on. Lots of
possible ways.

------
smsm42
> ~60% of visitors have adblock

This is much higher than I'd expect. Of course, it is a special kind of site,
but still. Can we say a model is in serious trouble yet?

~~~
Feniks
I'm amazed they can even tell. A lot of people who use adblocking also browse
as ghost traffic that can't even be analyzed.

~~~
Freak_NL
Ad blocking means that your browser does not send HTTP requests for items that
match the profile of ads and tracking beacons. A website can detect this by
creating a local asset linked to from the HTML that is never rendered, but
which looks like an ad from the ad blocker's perspective. If a browser loads
your page, but subsequently won't load that dummy asset, it is probably using
an ad blocker.

------
HoyaSaxa
As always, thanks for the very thorough write up. My immediate thoughts were
highlighted in the "Discussion" section. Namely, the demographic of your
website might respond more negatively to the presence of ads than the general
population. This seems to be substantiated by the unusually high use of ad
blockers (~60% vs ~18% [1]).

I also wonder if some of the drop off could be explained by the use of Patreon
and ads. For instance, I would never pay for Hulu because they still show ads.
Did you receive any Patreon cancellations or negative feedback from pledged
users?

[1] US ad block usage as of Feb 2017
[https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/](https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/)

~~~
gwern
Patreon-wise, I had ads long predating Patreon, so presumably anyone signing
up was already OK with that? I don't remember anyone ever complaining about
both ads & Patreon, unless there's a complaint form on Patreon.com I haven't
been checking. (Looking at the signup numbers, it goes from $619 for August to
$645 for September/October, which at least is in the predicted direction, but
too few datapoints to tell since the usual trend is upwards.)

------
47
How does this experiment methodology account for cross device mixed
experience? Because of the multiple devices use, There will be lot of users
that have seen both variation.

~~~
gwern
I think changes over time in device should be like any other unobserved
variable like age or country or gender which might affect traffic: averaged
out by randomization. The point of randomization is that on average, the two
groups will be balanced. (If the intervention itself changes the mix and the
changed mix then yields more traffic, then that changes what one might
speculate about how it works but the simple result of ads->less-traffic is
still true.)

------
Mz
I would love to remove ads from all but one of my sites. But I have not been
very effective at monetizing my writing some other way. I removed them from a
bunch of sites and saw a decrease in ad revenue, but did not see some
noticeable difference in either traffic or tips. (I only later added Patreon.)

There are myriad contributing factors that I can't isolate out. People don't
like ads, but many of the people who loudly complain about ads will also very
aggressively tell you that they will not tip, will not be a Patreon supporter
and expect high quality content for free. They will aggressively say that your
business model is your problem, not theirs, while actively shooting down any
way to monetize content.

These are often people who make good money as, for example, programmers.
Another thing such people have told me is to get a real job, like they have,
and write for free. It is a kind of classism in a sense: Writers who provide
good quality web content aren't seen as valuable or serious contributors the
way programmers are. Yet, at the same time, people decry both the lack of good
content and the trend towards content done as content marketing.

I get paid to write content done as content marketing. I rarely write anything
I feel bad about. I work on projects I can believe in. But I find it
frustrating because I would rather spend more of my time producing high
quality, independent content for my own projects. These are projects intended
to put out useful information and/or to be entertaining.

I am doing some unique things that add value to the world. I run a homeless
site with useful information for homeless Americans. Most homeless services
have terrible websites. They are almost always donor facing, not client
facing. It is very challenging for a homeless person to find useful
information online. I had a college class on internet search and I had a hard
time finding information I needed.

The other thing is that a lot of homeless services are a very negative
experience and can help keep you trapped. Services are often designed with the
idea that homeless people are incompetent losers who can't be trusted to make
good decisions. They often come with strings attached that can help keep a
person trapped in poverty.

I want to promote market based solutions that can work for homeless
individuals, but can lead to a future because they continue to be viable after
you get off the street. Programs to help the homeless or help poor people
often actively encourage failure.

I think I have worked out a couple of models that work, but I am not finding a
path forward. I continually come up against the idea that I should just stop
caring about marginalized people because there is no money in it. I should
just go where the money is, and never mind that the world is going to hell.

And I can't quite bring myself to do that because there is scary stuff
happening and I feel like if I don't do something, no one will. Because rich
people aren't going to solve it. The attitudes of so many of them that poor
people just need a handout (UBI), not earning opportunities, is part of the
problem.

We have the technology to allow people with disabilities, like me and my sons,
to work in a way that works for us. But I don't know how to overcome the
attitudes that we shouldn't bother to try, we should just accept that we are
losers unworthy of any respect.

The inability to get taken seriously is a big barrier to getting engagement
and traction and that is a big barrier to turning it into money. The whole
thing makes me crazy. It is a case of _the key is in the safe._

~~~
pault
> I think I have worked out a couple of models that work

You should write these up in detail and post it to HN. I would read it!

~~~
Mz
I have written about them and posted stuff to HN. It usually doesn't get much
attention.

Nutshell version:

1\. Flexible online means to earn money.

2\. Genuinely affordable market based housing, such as SROs.

I have several blogs where I talk about such things, like Mic Digs, Project:
SRO and Write Pay. They don't get much attention.

Edit: just to prove my point, here is a recent piece on working for pay while
homeless. I have submitted it to HN. You can go watch it be ignored:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15682882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15682882)

~~~
pault
Maybe you could do something like indie hackers [1] and highlight the stories
of people that are trying to get off the streets by doing online gig work.
That would be inspiring for people looking for help and interesting to
everyone else.

[1]
[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses)

~~~
Mz
I did spend some time looking over Indie Hackers yesterday. I am unclear
whether anything I do at all fits there. But thank you for suggesting it. I am
trying to figure out how to get taken more seriously, in spite of it being an
uphill battle for various reasons.

------
soared
I'm curious if any ad networks or SSPs are differentiating based on load
times. I wouldn't think so because big sites that drive lots of impressions
tend to load slower and aren't as concerned with page speed as someone like
OP.

I'd also be curious to see his user to patreon donator conversion rate, and if
removed ads and 'gaining' 10% of traffic would be worth it from a revenue
stand point.

------
yellow_postit
Unless I misread this it sounds like the assignment is on 2 day chunks rather
than some unique user ID. Just doing this at impression rather than user level
makes me question the applicability of the results, but really interesting
read nonetheless.

~~~
gwern
Per-user level doesn't capture the effects I am interested in. Imagine you
click on a website and the banner ad makes you subconciously less happy and so
you don't submit it to HN for thousands of other users to read; how would
randomizing on you and thousands of others' user IDs help? There's no way to
link your user ID's randomization to the subsequent visits (or non-visits) of
thousands of other people; it just averages everything out to 0 ('500 visitors
were exposed to ads, 500 were not; conclusion: ???'), when in fact the real
answer is something like '-1000 hits because user yellow_postit was exposed to
ads and didn't like them'.

But if you did it on a per-day or per-week or per-month basis, then you could
see effects like that: "on ad-free weeks, there are twice as many submissions
to Reddit which drives +100 hits per day" etc. Then you don't need to try to
track each individual user's activities or reshares - whatever the effects
are, they'll show up at the population level.

~~~
portman
Isn't this particular test susceptible to confounding effects? Traffic
fluctuates day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month, so how can you be
sure it was the presence-or-absence of ads and not something else? If you
randomize at the visitor level, you are sampling from both high-and-low
traffic days, and control for any external fluctuations.

~~~
gwern
Because you're randomizing at the 2-day level, on average there will be just
as many advertising/high-traffic days as advertising/low-traffic days, and as
many no-advertising/high-traffic days as no-advertising/low-traffic days. The
randomization is unaffected by traffic and uncorrelated with it. The unit of
analysis is each day, not each visitor. This is why it has to be run for
several months, otherwise you don't wind up with a decent n=50 pairs.

That's the tradeoff here: it lets you look at the totals, but it takes a lot
longer than if you randomize per visitor in which case you could finish the
test in a few days, often.

~~~
jackgolding
The stats went well over my head but as a web analyst I thought maybe you
could have asked a simpler question. Pick a segment of your site such as
visits from Google Search who landed on your homepage (most likely people who
searched "gwern") which should reduce a lot of those spikes.

~~~
gwern
Subsetting will also increase the variance of each datapoint (consider the
extreme case of picking a subset which was 0 or 1 visits per day), so is
probably not a win. It's also hard to imagine what subset properly reflects
all sources of traffic and so is informative about the total effect of
advertising. Search queries definitely is not it.

------
badrabbit
I don't know how much research has been done on the subject,but personally I
don't mind ads in general,I mind ads that target (stalk) me and intrusive ads.

I can tolerate ads that target the page content or random ads just fine.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> I don't know how much research has been done on the subject,but personally I
> don't mind ads in general,I mind ads that target (stalk) me and intrusive
> ads.

That used to be my position. I think I still don't mind honest-to-goodness
_advertising_ : this product/vendor exists and has these features. I actually
do still see this kind of ad on sites connected to electrical engineering;
presumably other competitive technical product areas like photography or
scientific/industrial equipment have it too. But the more I've experienced the
dissonance of being hit with bursts of mainstream advertising after moving to
a generally lower-advertising lifestyle (ad blockers/NoScript, cord-cutting,
more judicious selection of news sources, etc.), the more distinctly I've felt
the reality that we're almost a century into the general trend of
"advertising" being a euphemism for psychosocial manipulation. In other words,
modern advertising is for-profit propaganda. In my view, it's not enough for
the media of advertising to be more passive. The technology is amplifying it,
but the overall strategy is what's fundamentally exploitative. Many people
think that merely by being cynical about this, they're immunizing themselves.
It's tempting to think that if you study the techniques and make snarky
remarks like, say, "oh, look how _cool_ this Lexus is; if I buy it that means
I'm _powerful_ and _important_ ", then you've somehow defeated it. Make no
mistake: that's just another strand in the web. The idea that the advertiser
wants to push is still being normalized in your mind, even through the filter
of irony.

I don't intend to be alarmist here. Humanity has just about survived a century
of this crap, after all. Life goes on. Revolutions, both figurative and
literal, haven't been rendered obsolete by the sheer marketing budgets of
incumbents. But I think we _have_ evolved a warped view of what qualifies as
normal, honest communication.

------
username223
> A decision analysis of revenue vs readers yields an acceptable damage of ~3%
> total traffic loss. Power analysis of historical ... traffic data
> demonstrates that the high autocorrelation yields very low statistical power
> with standard tests & regressions but acceptable power with ARIMA models.

Was all that math worth your time, or would you have made more money selling
tamales on the corner?

