Could you point to some of the propaganda that we're "still indoctrinated" by [...]?
Sure - one of the biggest examples is the pervasive (and perverse) idea that the United States is a 'Christian' nation. During the Cold War, Eisenhower injected references to God in paper currency and our own Pledge of Allegiance, specifically to "unite" the country against the much-overstated Communist 'threat'. This has resulted in several generations of state and federal laws that illegally reflect 'Christian' doctrine, and several generations of people who support it and believe that's the only way it should be.
Only recently has society been able to start loosening that grip and begin the path to becoming the nation we were intended to be.
Nope. People just have an inflated sense of ego; a generation of everyone being a 'special snowflake' has caused them to believe they're the center of the universe, and everyone is just dying to record them going about their mundane lives.
Except that providing a good or service does not personally endorse the person or event that said good or service is used by/for.
These people need to get over themselves. Just like we want ISPs to be a 'dumb pipe' with no personal bias on data, companies should be providing their services equally, also with no personal bias.
And in that code - that the website controls, remember - they fire off four pings each time an ad is displayed. You, as the advertiser, have no true insight, and each website has no accountability into their traffic numbers.
Remember, you don't have a personal relationship with every website operator out there - your job is managing advertising for dozens of properties, ad networks, mobile, and maybe even non-internet mediums. Are you really going to agree to give money to a website on their word only?
If you are paying someone for every thousand impressions (called CPM) of an ad for your company, aren't you going to want to be sure that the website's traffic numbers were accurate?
But the vast majority of ad revenue is CPM (Cost Per Thousand [Impressions]). CPC pays more, but as you see on here, too many people are "I don't ever click ads"; it's a bonus, but no site can survive on CPC alone. Advertisers pay to get their message out (much like a billboard or a radio ad).
'Big' is relative; but the answer is no, they wouldn't. Sorry. I even just asked someone I personally know in that industry who said that they'd find that to be sketchy and would not run a campaign on a site that made such a demand - only for Amazon do they make such an exception. Not many websites are Amazon.
The problem is that you seem to think that the "virtual" world somehow is different than the "real" world.
Except it really is.
I'm not claiming what I did was necessarily the 'correct' answer, I was just relaying what it "was". However, you continue to insist that your way is the only proper way to do things - except many of your assumptions remind me a lot of the RIAA/MPAA arguments. It's a different medium. In an age where verification of impressions and clicks is possible, that's what advertisers are going to ask for. If I went to any of the larger entities and said "Hey I want you to buy ad space for $5K and you'll get a million impressions", do you really think they're going to just take my (or anyone's) word for it?
Uhhh. I had a very successful 5 years on ad networks. I explained that only after the mass proliferation of adblock did it become an issue. I don't see how "selling ad space directly" would have changed that, because the ad blocking would have prevented those impressions, too.
Early adblock blindly removed everything that had the dimensions of an ad, or were served with specific hostnames or URLs. You don't actually know how any of this works, do you?
In theory, ads aren't necessary to survive, this is true. But money is still required to create and sustain these websites, and in practice, direct subscription payment has not always proven successful. Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.
I still maintain that it benefit Pre-Google YouTube to have ads over subscriptions. The entire idea of YouTube was to quickly get videos up and out to the world. Putting that behind a paywall, especially back before it had the clout it does now, would have been suicide at the time.
Well, 'useful' to you may or may not be 'useful' to others.
I agree that those who directly sell products would still be around. I said exactly as much. But it doesn't make them 'not ads'.
That's great that SoylentNews can survive on donations. It looks like they require $6K/yr? ($3K per 6 months? Although the previous 6/mo was only $2K.. so not sure what it is, long-term). Either way, I'm admittedly very impressed they can consistently make that.
But you're forgetting YouTube (pre-Google - without ads, they wouldn't have been around for Google to buy). Imgur. Reddit. Twitch (pre-whoeverthefuckownsthem now). Similarly, there are several dozen websites related to gaming (that aren't exclusively "journalism") I can rattle off that exist solely on ads. Even some of the oldschool sites I visited in my youth like Stileproject (before it jumped the shark) or SomethingAwful, which are entertainment and not "journalism", would never have lasted long without advertising revenue. Hell, even TPB has ads, because they have costs.
There are several-hundred million active domains of varying success. The internet doesn't exist solely on websites you know about.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions to what I did or didn't do, or how much effort I exerted. An ad network is absolutely not inherently unsustainable.
Please know what you're talking about before making blanket statements.
I've thought of malware stipulations before and intend on testing one if/when the next time I deal with an ad network.
But good luck telling someone you're going to charge them an ad impression for an unserved ad just because it didn't load in a specific amount of time; the very nature of the internet doesn't allow for that kind of guarantee.
"Selling ads" does not make logical sense. What you mean to say is selling ad space. Content owners sell ad space - whether they sell them to ad networks, or to companies direct, you're selling SPACE. Virtual (or actual, in the case of print media) Real-estate.
I did have tens of thousands of visitors. That's why I had ad space. I used ad networks because I did not have the resources (including time, thankyouverymuch) to track down every company, pitch them, and implement their unique tags (and they all had different ad tags to verify traffic). Because the ad network could pitch campaigns as a group (my site, plus a few other sites), we got access to companies I wouldn't have been able to approach on my own. In addition, about 35% of my traffic was outside the US. Unfortunately, advertising is regional, so an ad network helped a) fill impressions for international traffic, and b) handled the payments.
You're also assuming that I used some generic ad network. For much of the life of my site, I was using a network that specifically catered to media and gaming-related websites. This helped to get and serve relevant ads, and I had a higher degree of security because they weren't one of those mass-market networks who just serve whatever, with no oversight.
You continue with these dangerous assumptions that make me feel you're not really interested in learning how the real (virtual) world actually works. I'm really not as much of an outlier as you think.
Ahhh, now I see the disconnect. Yeah, so online ads are nothing like print media, except the concept that you're selling 'real estate' for people to get their message out.
In the beginning, online ad tracking was to prevent fraud. This is also why they're served from the ad network and not the site itself. Otherwise, It would be trivial for me to say "Oh, man.. this month I had 4 million unique impressions!" when only four people ever visited the site. Has it gone way too far? Absolutely. The Ad industry greatly needs to change; there's no denying that. But it will always be here, as long as people are unwilling to directly pay for every single thing they consume.
"Worth it financially to hire a salesperson".. EL OH EL. I was a broke 24-year old with an unrelated full-time job that accidentally created something that blew up online. I absolutely did not have the resources to 'hire' anyone. The internet is a medium where traditional methods of business does not always apply. You cannot shoehorn your personal method of "how things should work", because it can turn on a dime.
I was not running a business. You're oversimplifying again. It was a hobby that happened to fill a need in the community I served.
I still don't understand what the hell you're going on about "selling ads" - You mean buying ads for traffic to my site? I did for a while, but it was expensive and didn't give me the result I wanted - I was in a community where it was all word of mouth.
If you're talking about selling ad space, then obviously I already was. That's why I had advertisements on the site. They came from an ad network because they helped me reach other advertisers that I absolutely could not on my own. I'll also note that I never had a security problem with that ad network.
What do you mean "the site owner can sell ads" - you mean ad space? Because that's what we're already talking about. That's the stuff that people are blocking. I don't understand.
That's not universal. Not everyone is running a little Wordpress blog. Sometimes people have data processing requirements to provide things like stats or other experiences for a relevant audience.
I used to run a site that at its peak, was costing $1K/month to host because I was co-lo'ing a dozen servers. That's not to say it couldn't have been lower if I really needed to (I had some extra servers for testing and failover), but it still wouldn't have come close to "a few bucks a month". Cloud-based providers (at least at the time) would have been triple that, mostly because of the bandwidth requirements (which I was graciously not charged for at my host). Advertising held it up for 5 years, until the "set it and forget it" nature of AdBlock (combined with ad pullback during the last recession) caused it to be unsustainable.
Ignoring the outcome, the simple fact I'm conveying is that it's a dangerous oversimplification to say that hosting is cheap for everyone, or assuming the only content on the web is blog-based. Some sites host video. Some create pictures. Some crunch a bunch of numbers to let you play Fantasy Football or whatever folks are into now. They're all equally useful to their own audiences.
I suspect you already know this and you're just being an idiot, but: Your ISP payment is one-way. You're paying them for access TO the internet through their systems. Your ISP or your fees do not help pay for Slashdot's servers.
Sure, but the vast majority of it was content linked on student homepages on University systems. Perhaps you want to go back to that - we here at Slashdot still embrace the convention. The signal to noise was damn near infinity:1 for sure. But someone was still footing the bill - in this case, tuition.
But now that anyone can get a presence online without going to a university, someone still has to pay for servers and/or bandwidth (and frankly 'time' has worth, too). Some dude blogging about cats on some $5 shared hosting can pay that out of pocket. But there's more to do on the internet than create blogs, and sometimes those websites become popular. When out-of-pocket is no longer viable, you have two options for continuing to fund the endeavor: direct payments (whether it be donations, one-time payments, or subscriptions), or ads.
I'm curious if the rise of the "App Store" might have changed some people's minds on direct-payment so that it's a little more viable, but that would only be extremely recently. I'd say at least 70% of the non-product internet survives on advertising in some form. And really, websites for products (e.g. Coke, Apple, etc) ARE advertising by nature. So I don't understand what it is you want that you think could actually be viable.
I disagree. Many stories can generate several different comment threads. I would be quite happy to moderate one thread that is either spewing knee-jerk crap where it's simply not worth responding to or wanting to upvote posts in a thread which need no further comment.. and then join another thread offering up useful discussion.
I'd be okay with not being able to mod in a thread you've commented in, but even then, sometimes half a story's comments come from a single GP.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you point to some of the propaganda that we're "still indoctrinated" by [...]?
Sure - one of the biggest examples is the pervasive (and perverse) idea that the United States is a 'Christian' nation. During the Cold War, Eisenhower injected references to God in paper currency and our own Pledge of Allegiance, specifically to "unite" the country against the much-overstated Communist 'threat'. This has resulted in several generations of state and federal laws that illegally reflect 'Christian' doctrine, and several generations of people who support it and believe that's the only way it should be.
Only recently has society been able to start loosening that grip and begin the path to becoming the nation we were intended to be.
Aaaand thanks for the sig.
Nope. People just have an inflated sense of ego; a generation of everyone being a 'special snowflake' has caused them to believe they're the center of the universe, and everyone is just dying to record them going about their mundane lives.
Except that providing a good or service does not personally endorse the person or event that said good or service is used by/for.
These people need to get over themselves. Just like we want ISPs to be a 'dumb pipe' with no personal bias on data, companies should be providing their services equally, also with no personal bias.
And in that code - that the website controls, remember - they fire off four pings each time an ad is displayed. You, as the advertiser, have no true insight, and each website has no accountability into their traffic numbers.
Remember, you don't have a personal relationship with every website operator out there - your job is managing advertising for dozens of properties, ad networks, mobile, and maybe even non-internet mediums. Are you really going to agree to give money to a website on their word only?
Think about that for a second. Just one.
If you are paying someone for every thousand impressions (called CPM) of an ad for your company, aren't you going to want to be sure that the website's traffic numbers were accurate?
But the vast majority of ad revenue is CPM (Cost Per Thousand [Impressions]). CPC pays more, but as you see on here, too many people are "I don't ever click ads"; it's a bonus, but no site can survive on CPC alone. Advertisers pay to get their message out (much like a billboard or a radio ad).
'Big' is relative; but the answer is no, they wouldn't. Sorry. I even just asked someone I personally know in that industry who said that they'd find that to be sketchy and would not run a campaign on a site that made such a demand - only for Amazon do they make such an exception. Not many websites are Amazon.
Online advertising just doesn't work that way.
But Reddit and OkCupid still have ads to subsidize the non-subscribing visitors.
The problem is that you seem to think that the "virtual" world somehow is different than the "real" world.
Except it really is.
I'm not claiming what I did was necessarily the 'correct' answer, I was just relaying what it "was". However, you continue to insist that your way is the only proper way to do things - except many of your assumptions remind me a lot of the RIAA/MPAA arguments. It's a different medium. In an age where verification of impressions and clicks is possible, that's what advertisers are going to ask for. If I went to any of the larger entities and said "Hey I want you to buy ad space for $5K and you'll get a million impressions", do you really think they're going to just take my (or anyone's) word for it?
Uhhh. I had a very successful 5 years on ad networks. I explained that only after the mass proliferation of adblock did it become an issue. I don't see how "selling ad space directly" would have changed that, because the ad blocking would have prevented those impressions, too.
Early adblock blindly removed everything that had the dimensions of an ad, or were served with specific hostnames or URLs. You don't actually know how any of this works, do you?
In theory, ads aren't necessary to survive, this is true. But money is still required to create and sustain these websites, and in practice, direct subscription payment has not always proven successful. Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.
I still maintain that it benefit Pre-Google YouTube to have ads over subscriptions. The entire idea of YouTube was to quickly get videos up and out to the world. Putting that behind a paywall, especially back before it had the clout it does now, would have been suicide at the time.
Well, 'useful' to you may or may not be 'useful' to others.
I agree that those who directly sell products would still be around. I said exactly as much. But it doesn't make them 'not ads'.
That's great that SoylentNews can survive on donations. It looks like they require $6K/yr? ($3K per 6 months? Although the previous 6/mo was only $2K.. so not sure what it is, long-term). Either way, I'm admittedly very impressed they can consistently make that.
But you're forgetting YouTube (pre-Google - without ads, they wouldn't have been around for Google to buy). Imgur. Reddit. Twitch (pre-whoeverthefuckownsthem now). Similarly, there are several dozen websites related to gaming (that aren't exclusively "journalism") I can rattle off that exist solely on ads. Even some of the oldschool sites I visited in my youth like Stileproject (before it jumped the shark) or SomethingAwful, which are entertainment and not "journalism", would never have lasted long without advertising revenue. Hell, even TPB has ads, because they have costs.
There are several-hundred million active domains of varying success. The internet doesn't exist solely on websites you know about.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions to what I did or didn't do, or how much effort I exerted.
An ad network is absolutely not inherently unsustainable.
Please know what you're talking about before making blanket statements.
I've thought of malware stipulations before and intend on testing one if/when the next time I deal with an ad network.
But good luck telling someone you're going to charge them an ad impression for an unserved ad just because it didn't load in a specific amount of time; the very nature of the internet doesn't allow for that kind of guarantee.
"Selling ads" does not make logical sense. What you mean to say is selling ad space. Content owners sell ad space - whether they sell them to ad networks, or to companies direct, you're selling SPACE. Virtual (or actual, in the case of print media) Real-estate.
I did have tens of thousands of visitors. That's why I had ad space. I used ad networks because I did not have the resources (including time, thankyouverymuch) to track down every company, pitch them, and implement their unique tags (and they all had different ad tags to verify traffic). Because the ad network could pitch campaigns as a group (my site, plus a few other sites), we got access to companies I wouldn't have been able to approach on my own. In addition, about 35% of my traffic was outside the US. Unfortunately, advertising is regional, so an ad network helped a) fill impressions for international traffic, and b) handled the payments.
You're also assuming that I used some generic ad network. For much of the life of my site, I was using a network that specifically catered to media and gaming-related websites. This helped to get and serve relevant ads, and I had a higher degree of security because they weren't one of those mass-market networks who just serve whatever, with no oversight.
You continue with these dangerous assumptions that make me feel you're not really interested in learning how the real (virtual) world actually works. I'm really not as much of an outlier as you think.
Ahhh, now I see the disconnect. Yeah, so online ads are nothing like print media, except the concept that you're selling 'real estate' for people to get their message out.
In the beginning, online ad tracking was to prevent fraud. This is also why they're served from the ad network and not the site itself. Otherwise, It would be trivial for me to say "Oh, man.. this month I had 4 million unique impressions!" when only four people ever visited the site. Has it gone way too far? Absolutely. The Ad industry greatly needs to change; there's no denying that. But it will always be here, as long as people are unwilling to directly pay for every single thing they consume.
"Worth it financially to hire a salesperson".. EL OH EL. I was a broke 24-year old with an unrelated full-time job that accidentally created something that blew up online. I absolutely did not have the resources to 'hire' anyone. The internet is a medium where traditional methods of business does not always apply. You cannot shoehorn your personal method of "how things should work", because it can turn on a dime.
I was not running a business. You're oversimplifying again. It was a hobby that happened to fill a need in the community I served.
I still don't understand what the hell you're going on about "selling ads" - You mean buying ads for traffic to my site? I did for a while, but it was expensive and didn't give me the result I wanted - I was in a community where it was all word of mouth.
If you're talking about selling ad space, then obviously I already was. That's why I had advertisements on the site. They came from an ad network because they helped me reach other advertisers that I absolutely could not on my own. I'll also note that I never had a security problem with that ad network.
What do you mean "the site owner can sell ads" - you mean ad space? Because that's what we're already talking about. That's the stuff that people are blocking. I don't understand.
That's not universal. Not everyone is running a little Wordpress blog. Sometimes people have data processing requirements to provide things like stats or other experiences for a relevant audience.
I used to run a site that at its peak, was costing $1K/month to host because I was co-lo'ing a dozen servers. That's not to say it couldn't have been lower if I really needed to (I had some extra servers for testing and failover), but it still wouldn't have come close to "a few bucks a month". Cloud-based providers (at least at the time) would have been triple that, mostly because of the bandwidth requirements (which I was graciously not charged for at my host). Advertising held it up for 5 years, until the "set it and forget it" nature of AdBlock (combined with ad pullback during the last recession) caused it to be unsustainable.
Ignoring the outcome, the simple fact I'm conveying is that it's a dangerous oversimplification to say that hosting is cheap for everyone, or assuming the only content on the web is blog-based. Some sites host video. Some create pictures. Some crunch a bunch of numbers to let you play Fantasy Football or whatever folks are into now. They're all equally useful to their own audiences.
I suspect you already know this and you're just being an idiot, but: Your ISP payment is one-way. You're paying them for access TO the internet through their systems. Your ISP or your fees do not help pay for Slashdot's servers.
Sure, but the vast majority of it was content linked on student homepages on University systems. Perhaps you want to go back to that - we here at Slashdot still embrace the convention. The signal to noise was damn near infinity:1 for sure. But someone was still footing the bill - in this case, tuition.
But now that anyone can get a presence online without going to a university, someone still has to pay for servers and/or bandwidth (and frankly 'time' has worth, too). Some dude blogging about cats on some $5 shared hosting can pay that out of pocket. But there's more to do on the internet than create blogs, and sometimes those websites become popular. When out-of-pocket is no longer viable, you have two options for continuing to fund the endeavor: direct payments (whether it be donations, one-time payments, or subscriptions), or ads.
I'm curious if the rise of the "App Store" might have changed some people's minds on direct-payment so that it's a little more viable, but that would only be extremely recently. I'd say at least 70% of the non-product internet survives on advertising in some form. And really, websites for products (e.g. Coke, Apple, etc) ARE advertising by nature. So I don't understand what it is you want that you think could actually be viable.
I disagree. Many stories can generate several different comment threads. I would be quite happy to moderate one thread that is either spewing knee-jerk crap where it's simply not worth responding to or wanting to upvote posts in a thread which need no further comment .. and then join another thread offering up useful discussion.
I'd be okay with not being able to mod in a thread you've commented in, but even then, sometimes half a story's comments come from a single GP.
Perhaps, but you'd only be one mod action. Presumably, there would be other mods whose votes would counteract your ragemod.