Slashdot Mirror
Advertising Companies Accused of Deliberately Slowing Page-load Times For Profit
An anonymous reader writes: An industry insider has told Business Insider of his conviction that ad-serving companies deliberately prolong the 'auctioning' process for ad spots when a web-page loads. They do this to maximize revenue by allowing automated 'late-comers' to participate beyond the 100ms limit placed on the decision-making process. The unnamed source, a principal engineer at a global news company (whose identity and credentials were confirmed by Business Insider), concluded with the comment: "My entire team of devs and testers mostly used Adblock when developing sites, just because it was so painful otherwise." Publishers use 'daisy-chaining' to solicit bids from the most profitable placement providers down to the 'B-list' placements, and the longer the process is run, the more likely that the web-page will be shown with profitable advertising in place.
Now I won't feel guilty about using Adblock. Oh, wait, I didn't feel guilty before I learned this.
Rotten Bastards.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
this "industry insider" most likely works for Business Insider.
Either everyone is breaking that 100ms limit, or else it is per ad and adds up if the browser is say, loading 5 at a time on a page with 20 ads. I have noticed sluggish loading on ad-laden sites for a very long time now, I keep trying to disable AdBlock to support sites and regret it soon after.
This also happens when the site is using the originally text-based Google AdWords - which btw has become worse over time, with some video ads being served and also some rogue publishers which aren't always caught (one site I regularly visit has semi-frequent complaints from users about problematic ads when they disable ABP to support it).
I suspect that besides just the ads loading time, they are increasingly using more detailed analytics js which also contributes to site slowness, in order to market data for higher premiums.
A society as diverse and populated as ours would crumble without a universal way to settle accounts. How would Walmart pay its Chinese suppliers? It is no accident all major empires in written and remembered history evolved past the barter system.
All that and money is how we keep score.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
My eyeballs are mine to keep
Not for you to make a dime a peep
Do we fight them, or are we sheep?
Burma Shave
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I clicked on a AD for a video on the YouTube homepage and you know what? It made me watch an AD before I could watch the AD I clicked on.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
My response to sites that ask me to disable ad-block is to point them to ad-block approved ads. I don't mind those.
I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service, signing up, whatever. Most of the increase is from a higher mis-click rate where the user is hitting close or back as quickly as they can.
Thing is, earlier advertising was much more nebulous about it's benefit. It's hard to tell how much soda any given soda commercial sells, whether it's worth it, etc... What metrics they do have shows that as the number of ads increase, the response rates fall - viewers become immune. And we're very immune at this point.
Hell, at this point aliens might find that we're 'utterly' immune to their propaganda due to the barrage we face every day.
I don't read AC A human right
I actually thought that was his sig.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?
E.g. Embed the ad in a sized Iframe.
Ok. Everyone hates ads.
What is the alternate solution? Are you willing to pay for a subscription to every site you visit? Do you want more "native content" intermixed with all these articles?
Let's face it, hosting sites and entertainment on the Internet isn't free. Soulskill has to eat and put a roof over his head. Along with the rest of the Slashdot staff. And those colo costs are non-zero.
Which do you want? Your "free" ad-based internet? Or the worse solutions that are coming if sites continue to not be able to cover their costs + profit using banner ads?
Seriously. Think about it. Then reply.
Start with this math. Take your personal salary. Divide it by $.001 (the cost to display a typical banner ad). Figure out how many banner ad views you need to cover your salary + benefits (they're not free either) at a moderately popular website. It's a frightening number. Even if you're just a lowly intern making minimum wage.
Then, think about other ways a site can generate that kind of revenue.
Which is the greater evil?
Reeses
They're not auctioning the page, they're auctioning YOU, and they can only do that once they know what you're going to look at.
Imagine if all the effort and resources put into advertising were instead redirected to productive purposes.
I mean the ones served "in passing". It just seems so counter-intuitive that someone would open a page to read an article or see pics and then ignore that thing and go read or watch the ad and click on it and remember any of it, let alone actually buy something.
I don't have AdBlock in one of the four browsers I run (Sandboxied Chrome -- the others are Sandboxied FF with no flash, non-Sandboxied FF with Noscript, and non-Sandboxied Chrome that I only use for 3-4 sites), and don't remember seeing anything remotely relevant or interesting, except for a couple of youtube ads, or ads for goods I already found and bought on Amazon. And I have clicked on an ad and bought something a number of times when I was searching for the item on Google, in the mindset of wanting to buy. Though I often end up going to Amazon and buying the item there.
Facebook in that sense seems the worst, no one is in a mindset to buy, they are just looking to score a bit of interesting info or pic from "friends". Imagine watching porn and seeing an ad on the side for 15% off for iphone cases. Well you most likely wouldn't even see the ad.
Anyway that's one datapoint. The 1st google search on "do web ads work" gives this ("A Dangerous Question: Does Internet Advertising Work at All?") http://www.theatlantic.com/bus.... Prob. another case where Betteridge's law holds.
Ever since I blocked 'player.ooyala.com', load times are much faster..
Everybody's got an angle. The supermarket strategically places carts and boxes in aisles to block a straight path to the checkout counter. They try to make you walk through the whole store. The world doesn't change.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Right, and human organ traffickers are stuck between a rock and hard place too but it's not my responsibility to help them out. So if advertisers can't make money without cheating then maybe they need to find a new career, and it's not our responsibility to put up with their tricks.
Also better if users learn to just stop going to web sites that they don't need to. If a site bombards you with ads, then rather than just turn on adblock there, just leave the site permanently and with prejudice. If it's your favorite blog site, then send an email complaining about how bad the ads are with the hope that someone gets the hint (it is not your job to provide charity to fund someone's hobby). This is analogous to people becoming fed up with cable companies and cutting the cord.
I see things sort of analoguous to shaving microseconds off of financial transactions. There's someone in the middle making money without being either producer or consumer and providing no real world value of any sort. Sort of like leeches but not as cuddly.
Communism?
You'll end up with most people spending most of their time working their niche talents while a few benefit from doing nothing but "lead"
Is this news? I've noticed the trend for months that a page loads slowly hoping that it can sneak an ad under your thumb before your brain realizes what's goin on.
player.ooyala.com seems to be a really big offender. I don't know what, precisely, they're serving up for Slashdot, but holy shit their response time is slow. I have Slashdot whitelisted and get by with the "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot..." blocking, but player.ooyala.com still takes 1-2 seconds per pageload to do whatever it's doing.
No, I don't want to hear about /etc/hosts. Just pointing out that while Slashdot runs this story, one of its own third-party embedded partners is a huge problem.
And - how does that differ from life in the US? Most people . . . niche talents . . . few doing nothing but leading. Especially now that young adults find it necessary to work two or more part time jobs to support themselves, most people do spend most of their time working their niche talents.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
When you say the ads have "lousy" response rates, you're making a comparison. The only number they can compare to is either a fantasy (what they think the click-through rate should be so that they'll strike it rich) or existing obtrusive ads. Neither of these work with reality, where most people will rarely click on an ad intentionally, and even fewer will actually spend any money.
Advertisers will do whatever they can to increase their revenue, that's why we've had pop-ups, drive by installs, ads that spread malware, auto-playing video ads, etc. The only thing way to control it is for browsers to put heavy limits in place (like built-in pop-up blockers, or Chrome disabling secondary flash elements). Pretty soon things like uBlock will just start getting built in to the browser. When the advertisers bitch, we'll just point them to behavior like this that demonstrates their bad faith.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
Microtransactions were once suggested as a solution to this problem, but credit card transaction fees destroy the profitability unless these are collected regularly and then charged in bulk. Some startup could sell NetBux, so a $0.05 microtransaction could be transferred free deducting from a $5 balance; credit card companies would only get a cut for that single $5 purchase. However, unless every browser manufacturer integrates NetBux support, it's dead in the water. Since everyone and their grandma would want to own the NetBux standard and take a cut of that, the most viable option is Bitcoin: it's free, noone owns it, it already exists, and has widely supported infrastructure.
Your browser would have a new UI element that lets you type in a redemption code for a Bitcoin card you buy at a store, or you can import from a wallet. It'd also have as part of the UI what your balance is. If you go to the landing page of say CNN.com it'd advertise prominently what the cost per story is. Click on a story, and before it pops up, the web browser asks if you accept the charge and tells you what the cost is. If you accept, then that amount is deducted, with an option to 'remember for this site.' This site would then be whitelisted, but only at the agreed-upon fee. The whitelist would need to only work for certain subdomains, or something, so that an official page could charge you, but not user content (comments, complementary webpages ala Angelfire, email, etc.) Perhaps it'd involve signed certificates; if you want to charge to access a page, there's no excuse for it not to be encrypted.
It'd be anonymous enough for most people, and porn sites would love it: "click this video, only 3cents; access this photo gallery for 2cents".
It'd also make it trivial to finally implement the 'paid prioritized email' idea, so that non-spam would make it through filters by being accompanied by a 'gift' of a couple cents.
One downside is that it'd be an obvious target for malware; have your botnet send their $5 to your anonymous account. Tying a credit card to the browser to auto-refill the balance would be even worse. There'd also be young kids who click 'accept' on the 'deduct $1.00?' prompts not realizing it's real money, and parents who are sick of refilling their kids' browsers, wondering where that money is going.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Imagine if all the effort and resources put into advertising were instead redirected to productive purposes.
You mean more productive like popups from every website saying "Support our site! Now that all internet Advertising has been banned, you have to pay us 17 cents for every page you view".
I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service, signing up, whatever. Most of the increase is from a higher mis-click rate where the user is hitting close or back as quickly as they can.
While it's true that I tend to click on the obtrusive ads much more than the low-key unobtrusive ones, that's only because I'm trying to click on the f'ing tiny little close button (which is even harder to hit on a tablet or phone). Then when I click on the add because I missed the close button by a pixel or two and the advertiser's page loads, I'm pissed off at whatever they are advertising, so I can't imagine that my click was worth paying for.
Whenever a site takes an overly long time to load or is add loaded I go to their competotors web site which seems to be quicker loading. Also many ad rotator providers have become 0-day security risk so I just block them by default.
I'd be good with that. Give everyone an incentive to never go to web sites again, or at least stop browsing mindlessly and instead pay attention to what they are doing. Not a bad thing. Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway).
I'd be good with that. Give everyone an incentive to never go to web sites again, or at least stop browsing mindlessly and instead pay attention to what they are doing. Not a bad thing. Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway).
Yet you visited Slashdot long enough to not only click through to this article, but also post 7 comments.
For someone so keen on seeing the death of the web, you sure use it alot. Or when you said "Give everyone..." did you just mean "everyone else", because your rules don't apply to yourself?
Society has functioned without web sites, and it will again (and pretty soon too as it's all moving to phones/tablets now anyway
In what way do you envision phones and tablets making the web go away? I browse the web on my tablet and phone much more than on my computer.
Google is the largest in the real-time-bidding area, and they clearly care a lot about getting the bids in a short time. They directly suggest that you have machines physically located near their trading locations, and encourage you to peer with their routers: https://developers.google.com/... It's possible some of the other exchanges behave badly, but the benefit of waiting longer is going to be fairly small. All their bidders designed their systems to meet that 100ms time window. The benefit of waiting isn't going to be that great when all the heavy bidders already have bids in.
If the page loads slow, the user will go. Elsewhere.
This is good news. I sincerely hope it triggers a fevered rush by advertisers to outdo each other in slowing down page loads.
One of the rare occasions I've found a compelling reason to endorse stupid.
Slashdot has said that I can opt out of ads. Which I don't bother doing since I have adblock, but... If it starts charing $0.17 a page, then I'll stop visiting. Other useful sites I may stick around with $0.17 a page (and it has to be per page, not per third party script/gif).
People cut the cord from cable companies which used to be considered unthinkable. So I think people will be able to wean themselves away from fluff web sites too.
But think of it this way, I'm already paying over $50/month to get on the web. Why should I be told that I have to pay extra or view ads just to click on a link to some bozo's blog? Worse, why should advertisers be allowed to STEAL my bandwidth and time by piggybacking on my ISP? Broadcast over the airwaves is fine with me, as long as I can look away from the TV and go get a sandwich; but borrowing my internet to show me an ad that I can't skip, that's just immoral.
Somebody is trying to push his crappy product really hard. With Slashdot postings that are Ads. Pretty ironic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
My apologies for that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm trying to figure out how exactly he knows when to jump in with his verbal diarrhea. I suspect he's got some web searches for "adblock" and "apk", among other things. He clearly takes this all very seriously, keeping tabs on his various anonymous posts so he can jump in with his super clever "you still can't prove me wrong" and if you really rustle his jimmies he'll stalk you and post about how you're a troll and shit. Which is pretty amusing, since his constant crapfloods and shit posts are classic trolling. Guess it takes one to know one, eh APK?
P.s. inb4 "Show me your medical license 'Doc' Honcho, blah blah blah."
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
APK
Fuck off APK. Once was enough of your damaged posts, beyond that it's just shilling for shit.
Why don't you go home and spend some quality time with Sex Conker, be the cow in his life.
If we wanted a brain dead multi-megabyte host file we'd make it ourselves - certainly wouldn't download one of yours everyday.
Now if only I had a filter for APK without having to browse at above 0 and miss some of the good posts....
APK's host file ships with Windows 10.
Most primitive societies evolved past the barter system to a form of community credit. You can use salt, shells, gold or the word of someone in good standing.
However what does that have to do with fiat money specifically? It is not required that money be fiat in order to represent a store of wealth - in point of fact fiat is only a claim on the future tax income of a nation state.
If you're not using an ad blocker in 2015, you're an idiot. It really is that simple.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I used to work for a company that, in a roundabout way, presented advertising to consumers. And, I mean...yeah, of course they waited longer than 100ms for everyone to get their bids in.
What many people don't consider is that while the primary ad presenter is getting bids, many of those buyers are doing an auction to their own list of buyers, and some of those do auctions too, etc., etc. So a lot of those buyers would take longer than the time limit we wanted to come back to us, but they were usually some of our biggest buyers. The ones that didn't actually buy many ads would get discontinued, because we didn't want to slow down load time for someone that never actually won the bid. But the big buyers, we would generally loosen the time constraints.
The wording of the summary and article make it sound like the advertisers are cackling and holding up their pinky finger, smiting the populace with longer load times for the monies. The reality is that they aren't thinking about your load times at all, most of the time. You are the product. Load times really only entered the minds of business leaders when traffic volume was dropping.
While tragic, I'm sure the unemployed were comforted in knowing that their (former) company wasn't profiting off of anyone.
I don't know about ads (I think I trained my brain to ignore them), but slashdot does exactly the same thing.
So Comcast isn't incompetent after all, just bribed up the wazoo.
Table-ized A.I.
Came to read interesting comments. Left because of APK posts.
is quite simple.
bought advertisements, targeted for the site, bought from the site.
not involving the ad network middlemen. the problem with them in the first place is that any friggin site can have ad network ads in the first place and as result there's no CURATION whatsoever and quality of content doesn't really matter(only getting the viewer to the page matters! if the content is worse than the ad then that's a plus for the publisher too.. ).
the cancer of the modern internet is quite simply the ad networks - it makes it possible to monetize a site on the day one before a single human being looks at the site and thinks "do I want to pay ads to appear on this piece of shit?". it also leads to rather shitty content and just verbatim copied content propagating without reason.
then there's the cancer of the cancer: chained advertisement sites! you know, paying for clickbait advertisements that then only lead to pages that have MORE advertisements in an effort to pay for clicks that are supposed to be worth more directly just in adverts.
mobile slashdot sucks bigtime because of their advertisements. it makes it stutter even on galaxy note edge and I seriously doubt even the editors know what kind of advertisements get inserted(half a screen sized shit that is poorly coded making scrolling stutter). if they were advertisements bought from slashdot served _from_ slashdot with some sort of editiorial resemblance it wouldn't be half bad. now they only rely on miss clicks when scrolling. the stuttering makes the miss clicks even more likely!
all the browsers should just ship with ad blocking. but why do you think google came up with Chrome in the first place?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Please, please, either stop posting your long winded message or just reduce the content down to a few lines. You have made your point, many of times, and obviously are proud of your product / solution. But some of us are getting tired of reading it over, and over, and over, and over. Please show a little bit of respect to others here and stop posting it so much.
Regards,
Your fellow Geeks
Like I said - higher mis-click rate. Making the close buttons tiny only pisses users off more, but ad servers 'encourage' that because they're paid more by the click, as you say. But that just pisses users off. I think the ad people are 'okay' with it because hunting for the close button helps.
Oh, and I've seen a number on my phone lately where they put the close button on the left side, not the right where you expect it.
I don't read AC A human right
First off, let me clarify: I can actually see the value of good advertising, and there are adverts that I have enjoyed in the past, mostly the ones that manage to be humorous. A good example in UK is the a chain of opticians called Specsavers; they are not actually particularly good, in my view, but the adverts are fabulous. Another one is for a roadside assistance provider (RAC? Blue Flag?) where a guy fills up with the wrong fuel and has a nightmare fantasy about his girlfriend writing a song called 'Piggy Eyes'. Heady stuff.
But the industry should pull their socks up and police their own ranks, because 90% or more is utter, vile crap, that only serves to drive people away from the products they advertise. Or failing that, governments should do it for them, harshly and draconically. It isn't just about protecting consumers, it is about protecting legitimate businesses and their legitimate advertising as well.
Normally they're looking at 'fantasy'. They're paying more than they want for the number of responses they get.
Like I was trying to point out earlier, paper, magazine, television, and radio ad responses are harder to measure than computer ad 'click-through'. Some of the examinations I've seen has the experts pointing out that there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.
Basically, they were backtracking to try to figure out why computer ads were doing so 'poorly' compared to existing media using various metrics, when they realized that computer ads aren't less effective according to traditional metrics, but are lousy by the enhanced metrics. Then they started looking into traditional advertising, and started finding the same things - advertising not as effective as believed.
This probably is part of what led to the even more advertising, but that has the problem that it's actively driving viewers away from traditional media.
I don't read AC A human right
there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.
That would explain the massive amount of junk mail still being sent out. I don't know anyone who opens the big thick envelope of ads that we get every Tuesday, or who has ever even leafed through the ten page advertising flyer that comes on Tuesday and Friday. The local bird-cage-liner newspaper claims a circulation of 40,000, but most of those never make it any further into the house than the recycle bin.
I guess I shouldn't complain though, the junk mail helps subsidize the USPS.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I have three browsers two have ad block one does not and that gets little use. I use the non adblock for flash as flash can kill my linux desktop with a restart at a certain resolution.
So i get adverts in this use case, most of the adverts where repeated, and one was an infomercial for a water heater which ran to twenty minutes was relatively local to my location and it played about fifteen times in the hour of the flash thing. The next day i looked at the band width used was incredible and decided that if I was the firm who bought the slots knew that i had seen it fifteen times then would be downright pissed off at the ad serving company.
Sure there ad got seen fifteen times by one set of eyeballs who was a 'local' but i dont have an immersion heater. Actually i found the ins and out of bad installations of these products interesting but i soon returned to my adblock browser. If isps insist on quotas for end users then ad block makes a lot a sense.
Frankly, "his conviction" that they do this isn't really all that damning. Does he have any actual, you know, PROOF that this is true?
Disclaimer: I use AdBlock, and never see this stuff anyway....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
After some major disasters, airline disaster begged the governments to regulate them so that users could trust them again. Otherwise in "free market" there is no way new airlines can be blocked from taking some risks with users' safety for saving a few bucks and thus scare users into avoiding ALL airlines.
Advertisers know there are bad apples in the lot, their own brethren. They don't do anything to protect the user. So they are distrusted. So Adblock.
If they want to get back into users' trust, it is their job to figure out how. But taking a leaf out of airlines' book would at least be considered an attempt to win back trust.
Before you dismiss these as dissimilar cases, think this.
Use of a typical advertisement poses a lot less risk than an airline - chance of computer infection vs dying in a fireball. Discontinuation of the use of an advertisement is also a lot easier than that of an airline - installing adblock once vs travelling 5-10 times slower. The ratio of "ease of avoidance" vs "value" is not very different between airlines and advertisements.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
You can fill in the rest
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I dare say we use the barter system all the time. I use it more frequently than most. Just because we have a bit of paper to indicate a value does not mean we are not bartering. Paper is just one item of value. You can even barter at big box stores (I understand - I have never tried it) and ask for a different price or ask them to match a sales price. You need to ask a manager but you can and, I understand, they may listen.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Give me stuff for free because I am special!!!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I'll buy that argument.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
They do accept it. If they did not accept it they would not be watching it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
APK, has it ever occurred to you that this repeated posting of the same copy/paste is actually worse than many ads? You are as bad as the pop over ads, and almost as bad as an autoplay video. No one cares how good you think your software is. ABP works, ublock works, your shit just annoys the hell out of people. We are all technical people, if we find the need to run a monolithic hosts file, we will find yours with Google. Constantly spamming your unblockable ad just irritates people and makes them want to blacklist your hosts file instead.
You are worse than many ads, does your hosts file block your persistent ads?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Those go right into the recycle bin in my house. I asked the mail women if there was any way I could set "current resident" to "return to sender" which made her chuckle and point out that the ads are likely the only thing keeping the post office afloat.
I actually told the paper boy I didn't want the paper at all when he first asked. So now it gets thrown into my parking spot for free instead...quite irritating having to clean up the garbage they throw into my spot though.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That is *their* money - it belongs to the company. Once you give something away it no longer belongs to you. If I pay you for services rendered it is your money - it no longer belongs to me in a legal, abstract, or philosophical way. Once you pay a company you have given up that money. It then belongs to the company.
I suspect you are daft, ignorant, or trying to troll.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yeah, it is fun to pick on him, but it gets old. I try to educate him about how he appears to us now.
I place him somewhere between popover ads and autoplay video ads. I would pay for his product if it blocked his crapflood on Slashdot, but even his hosts files can't block his own ads.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Which is why the TV viewing public always considered advertising time as the time to hit the bathroom or cook the popcorn. Many people don't sit through the ads, and nothing requires them to do so. With Tivo now, I know people who pause the show when they need to go to the bathroom and fast forward through the commercials.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
doing a good job, and not being an asshat
But that's beyond most people's abilities.
Plus, paying for advertising is easier.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think this person has some pretty bad mental defects that make him do this with compulsion on the level of an automaton. Maybe his psychiatrist recommended communicating with other people or something like it.
Fortunately, the style is an immediate warning to any non-insane person as to what is going on here.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But they still consume the ads and media. They still buy the products. The ad ecosystem is not going away. There was no utopia on the 'net where ads did not exist - we called them webrings back then. Everyone was always advertising something else. People were always listening. It is more prevalent and easier now than ever but this has not changed and people will always opt to consume the media and will opt to buy the advertised products. Citation? Ads still exist. They can (and do) track them and track their effectiveness. If they did not work we would not have ads.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
People consume ads when not watching them? How does that work?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I'm a fan of apk. Yes he trolls, but he only trolls where it's contextually appropriate. I respect that.
I'm a fan of apk. Yes he trolls, but he only trolls where it's contextually appropriate. I respect that.
Sad. And sadly deluded. Like I said, one post is more than enough - does that not sound like respect for the deranged? He's got what - more than a dozen fat trolls posted in response to this story?
You must be new around here - or have a distorted idea of "contextually appropriate". He trolls anywhere, and he stalks anywhere.
What do you call a mugging? Performance theatre?
I suppose by your logic Love Canal was some sort of wetlands revegetation project.
I'm sorry, but that is not my account. Also, I have never run from APK. Though his particular form of insanity is pretty scary.
Get help man, it can't be healthy to live like this.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I had a long back-and-forth with apk a few months ago. I largely agree with him, except inasmuch as he sets it up as an "either/or" rivalry between extensions and the use of a properly configured hosts file, rather than recognizing that extensions and hosts are best used in a complementary relationship with one another.
For instance, there are a number of features that extensions can do that hosts simply can't do (e.g. outright removing elements from the DOM so that they doesn't waste screen space), yet apk was reluctant to acknowledge those benefits in the discussion we had, though he was very quick to acknowledge the things that hosts can do that extensions simply can't do (e.g. blocking malicious traffic outside of the browser). He's not wrong about the benefits of hosts, but it makes it a bit hard to take him seriously when he's only willing to acknowledge facts that point towards the benefits of his product and is quick to dismiss valid use cases that don't align with how his product gets used.
As an example of that, when I suggested that one benefit of extensions was how easily they could be recommended to and used by non-technical users, since they're widely compatible and setup generally consists of just clicking a download link, he continued to insist that hosts was easier to setup, use, and keep up-to-date, and held up his product as proof of that fact. He didn't have an answer for me when I pointed out that his software can't run on my primary PC at home since it's booted into OS X. Nor, would I imagine, would he have an answer for me if we started discussing iOS, since users don't have access to the hosts files, whereas they do have access to extensions.
Meanwhile, you're engaging in what appears to be a non-ironic use of ad hominem to suggest that someone isn't skilled enough to make their point. Ouch.
Unjustifiable? He's spamming.
Proving him wrong? He's generally not wrong. He's attempting to mislead people by being selective about the information that he chooses to present.
His claims are mostly sound (I'd quibble over a few of the more subjective ones), but he's only presenting information that supports his product, while ignoring similar information that supports competing products. He's presenting this as some sort of a rivalry between hosts and ad-blocking extensions, and only talks about the benefits that hosts has, when the truth of the matter is that each of them has different capabilities and excels in different areas, so they're best used in a complementary fashion, rather than mutually exclusively. There are a number of things that ad-blocking extensions can do that hosts can't, but you'll be hard-pressed to get him to acknowledge them. Likewise, you'll be hard-pressed to get him to acknowledge that ad-blocking extensions may be a better solution for certain people who aren't technically-inclined and would have trouble using a tool such as his (assuming they can use it at all, since his tool doesn't run on OS X, for instance, last I checked).
Does your hosts file block your own advertisements? I'd pay for it if it did.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
They are obviously watching otherwise they would not be paying. I suppose you know better than the experts who track these sorts of things. I am not sure why you think a company is solely motivated by greed in one thread and then presume that they are paying for ads for no reason in another. Just because you do not watch ads does not mean that they are not being watched. They are, they are selling things through them still, and this is unlikely to change in the near future. But you know better... Cute.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I can't say I have ever seen a camera on a TV to make sure you are watching the ads. please show me evidence of this.
Considering for years advertising has been tanking, it must be me that is causing it according to you, but I don't know anything.
Where am I speaking of companies being motivated by greed?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The first DuckDuckGo search I did turned up our last discussion. But thanks for jumping to wrong conclusions that are easily disproven and then basing a series of false accusations on them. I've come to expect nothing less from you.
(quick aside: while I know others have multiple accounts, this is my only one, and the only time I post as AC is when I post sensitive information)
Anyway, I have no intention of getting dragged into another discussion with you. You and I have already said what we want to say to each other, both in that last discussion and in the one that preceded it (which is linked from the last one). I have nothing more to add, and I'm frankly not interested in hearing anything else you might have to say.
Have a good day.
I'm not attempting to prove you wrong. As I said, other than quibbling over some of the subjective claims, I find your objective assertions to be generally accurate, even though they're misleading in how one-sided they are, just the same as when news reporters cherry pick statistics to suit their narrative. Yes, they're factually correct, but you're using them to paint a misleading picture of reality
I've already provided specific examples of that sort of behavior in response to and in relation to you numerous times (including in the thread you just linked), and I will not be drawn into yet another worthless discussion where we rehash those same points again.
Sure. Watch broadcast TV, listen to the radio, walk down the street. All free. All have ads though, but in every case you can opt out of the ads and refuse to watch or listen to them. In no case are you required to view to an ad, it doesn't suck up extra gasoline from your car, you can't get malware, etc. These are background ads, ignorable, totally unlike web ads.
Oh, and I pay subscription for some of those services too, including "free" radio. I'm not freeloading like the web advertisers are.
Nah, the advertisers are paying. They pay the site owners/operators.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yeah those companies are just paying for ads because it is tradition and not because they have millions of data points that track purchase times and places to verify those ads are watched and acted on. Yup... You are definitely right and they are wasting their money.
You serve no valid function and are summarily dismissed. Have a day.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Does your hosts file block your own advertisements? I'd pay for it if it did.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Yeah, because Coke and Pepsi really need to advertise, and Budweiser always sells more beer because they advertise.
Look, you can keep trying to say that because people spend money on it, it must still be working, however, smarter people than I have run scientific studies showing that advertising just doesn't work as well as was thought previously. Try it yourself if you like, buy an advertisement for something and see how much interest you get. Digital media has shown the advertisers that ads just don't work. The clickthrough on advertisements in digital media is abismal. It is widely considered now that the traditional media advertising response rates was wildly inflated and was likely nowhere near what it was claimed to be.
But I'm the one without a valid function...have a GOOD day to you too.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Here are the numbers for my other post:
http://www.smartinsights.com/i...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
To whatever idiot is posting this: posting multiple long repetitive advertisements with bad typography to a discussion forum is not going to increase my chances of looking at whatever it is you're selling.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
He thinks we're sock puppets.
Hello fellow puppet! My name is DocHoncho. I am puppet #3242, and my dream date is a quiet night at home tormenting apk!
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
But the Master wants us to play with you!
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
APK, seek help, you have this delusion, and it doesn't seem to be getting better.
The FEATURE of which you speak is an optional item, not required. Who cares if ABP subsidises itself by allowing some advertisements through to those who have agreed to see them? Perhaps ABP will lead to more ad networks improving their behavior so they can make some money, who knows.
Now, if only hosts file or ABP would block your crapflood of posts, life would be grand.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?