How were the forum readers supposed to know a kid's train was coming to town for a weekend, if not for ads?
A forum user may post a report about their recent visit, read an article about it in a newspaper, may have received a direct letter or catalog (both ads, but not tangled with editorial), or spotted it in a classified section of a publication (I have less trouble with these than ads placed around content).
Ads, targeted to me, with stuff I might care about, are an effective way to message me. I don't have time to do random web searches... An ad is a quick and effective way for me to know something I might care about.
It depends if you're willing to put up with the 99.9% of ads that don't interest you, and doubt over whether to trust what those that do are telling you.
True. But a benign agenda is to earn a living by telling as close as possible to the whole truth.
The best way to guarantee someone is working in your interests is to pay them the full cost of their work for you. But because people are willing to compromise on this price, they also must compromise on the truth. Ads in media are an extreme end of this tradeoff: free content surrounded by annoying lies. But there are alternatives in the middle.
That's a pretty accurate description of what I do. I don't work for anyone or promote one given company. The ads that people are there to see is the content of the site, and it is a subset of what it's trying to sell. But you can't get it on the "manufacturer's" web-site without paying for it. My site provides free samples. Think of people who might go to Costco on Friday just for the samples, and if they really like something in particular they might buy it. The only difference is, people usually don't perceive the content on my site to be an advertisement, and I'm in the very fortunate position where 99.99% of my competitors shove blatant ads and pop-ups down their surfer's throats. People tell me they come to my site because there are no ads.
I don't fully understand how your site works and earns income, but, as long as people aren't being deceived, helpful content and services over straight ads is definitely the wave of the future.
Earlier this summer I saw an ad for a "Thomas and Friends" train ride in a town an hour from here. Took my kids, they loved it. It was fun. How the smeg would I have even known about it without having seen an ad? You suggesting I should have randomly searched and spontaneously discovered it?
You could have found out about the train ride from reading an article in a publication or a post in a forum. You can be more confident of a good time if such an independent source say's that it's fun. The publication is rewarded for its work either by you buying it, or by getting an affiliate payment from the train ride for the help it gave to someone who ended up being a customer. Or an amateur online forum may just be run as a hobby, with goodwill and the odd donation the only rewards.
Or you may use a search engine to look for kids' activities, come across the train ride in an organic result (a website is a good form of advertising), or in the search engine ads (sure, the activities that pay the search engine the most will be the most prominent, but at least the ads are delivered to you on-demand, rather than pushed to you around other content).
I think the best well-known type of advertisement that's going in the right direction is product placement. It can be done poorly, yes and I know I am about to get a bunch of replies from people telling me that they always notice it and it ruins the program etc. But it *CAN* be done in a subtle way that blends with the program and does not detract, to the point where the viewer does not notice or care.
What sort of disclosure do you display on this sponsored content? Are users clearly informed they're ads? This suggests not:
...the people who visit my web-site have no idea that the entire site is one giant advertisement; in fact, people have complimented and praised me for not having any ads on the site.
As long as I'm told that certain content has an agenda, I agree that a coherent article or whitepaper is a much better ad than a banner.
The problem is that if I know it's an ad, I may as well read it on the company's own website, which I can be made aware of through a search engine ad or organic result (which requires me to be actively looking, and only search engines get paid), or through an ad on a site like your own (which I'm likely to block because they intrude and don't give me the full picture, only information from those who choose to advertise). Much better would be if I could learn about things through unbiased content written by you and your users, and you get paid through affiliate-like mechanisms.
Basically, I Adblock everything, but whitelist the sites I support.
Does the article submitter find these ads on whitelisted sites useful? Unless they're influencing his/her purchases, the sites in question won't benefit in the long run because both click and display pay rates have to eventually reflect this influence.
Sure ads can make you aware of things, but their sine qua non is to not tell the whole truth. There will always be a big supply of advertising because it's lucrative to spin, the problem is the demand for it is whittling away as advertisers and publishers go overboard, and because the Net has added better ways to research and learn about products.
I think advertising is still needed to allow businesses to get their message out when there isn't sufficient independent help available at an acceptable price. But advertising that interrupts media is among the worst types, just behind telemarketing and door-to-door.
The broadcasters are relying on the fact that many want to watch shows when they're first available, so that we can be in the loop with our friends and colleagues. If it wasn't for the social aspects of media consumption, most would be willing to be years behind the curve, cherry-picking the extensive and inexpensive back catalog. This water-cooler effect gives the broadcasters the market power to get away with their bundling, blocking the ability to purchase individual programs at their time of first release, which is encouraging piracy, They'll continue to get away with this until more program-makers finance and distribute their work independently.
Then we calculate the ratio of (ad expense)/(profit generated). For Google ads, this is about 1.6. For Facebook ads, it is about 0.2. Guess where we no longer buy ads?
Just to confirm: you're saying that for your wife's business, Facebook ads are 8 times more effective than Google ads.
This is increasingly true for all start-ups. Even if a start-up has no IP, and its platform can be easily cloned, it can be valuable solely from the users it's accumulated. VCs now look for at least one of the 3Ps: people, profit, and popularity. Get the people then find a business model to exploit them.
Advertising isn't meant to inform, it's meant to deceive in a way that goes right up to that line of lying -- but in theory not cross it. They often do cross the line into outright lies, and then our legal system has to kick in.
Yes, it's hard for ads to lie. But the sine qua non of advertising is to speak less than the whole truth. An ad is not going to tell you if there's a better deal than the one being offered.
So to choose wisely you either have to look at ads for a variety of options (including ads that aren't pushed to you, like product websites), or pay someone to help you. Pushed advertising is counting on us being too lazy, busy, or tight to do either.
...that whole model of forced advertising is going away. The writing is on the wall.
Yes as we get more affluent and rational we'll be less willing to trade our time watching ads for free or subsidised content, preferring instead to get relevant ads on-demand from search engines, or eschewing ads altogether and learning about things being sold from editorial content that unlike ads doesn't push an agenda by giving you less than the whole truth.
As it runs low on the fuel of poverty and irrationality that sustains it, advertising's currently passing through its bloated red giant stage. The core collapse is imminent. But the white dwarf remnant will remain a slowly diminishing beacon in our culture for many years.
I'm surprised that unlike Chrome the Firefox site launcher grid doesn't come up on new windows, only on new tabs. I'm most likely to use it in a new browsing context in a new window, rather than in a new tab which I mainly open for links within a site, or pages with a related use (e.g. documentation).
You'd also run into vocal minorities, which would be especially heavy as time wore on. John Q. Public doesn't really want to vote on every single bill or issue that arises, that's why he's happier with a republic than a direct democracy.
You could counter this by giving the representative one proxy vote for each citizen who doesn't cast a ballot on each issue. This would however mean that the representative stays in control unless 50-75% of citizens cast individual ballots on an issue. So you could tweak it to dial down the weighting of representative votes as participation rates increase.
The security of online voting doesn't concern me as much. There is however an insoluble choice between anonymity (the secret ballot) and making it easy to buy and sell votes. But attendance at a polling booth isn't a perfect system either.
I can scan my eyes across newsprint 5 times as fast as I can across a computer screen. I see stuff in my newspaper I would NEVER have found online.
Unlike newsprint, digital publications have index pages with many headlines (sometimes with short summaries) that are separate from full articles. I find these much quicker to scan than a layout of complete articles, particularly when articles in a printed paper are surrounded with ads that can't be automatically removed like they can on webpages.
The problem is that I'm usually only interested in one article in a hundred, which makes it hard to justify a subscription over an a la carte model.
But given the small fraction of readers who actually see a particular ad in a freely-distributed publication, the smaller number who are interested in it, and the even smaller number who are influenced by it, it's understandable why many advertisers are migrating to the better ROI platforms of search engine ads and their own websites, squeezing the money available for editorial, which is our only source of purchase information that has at least has some chance of being free from spin.
You want subscription money? You're gonna deliver a product free of ads.
That's not going to happen with most newspapers and magazines. People won't pay extra for an ad-free experience when it's easy to ignore or block the ads. It may be another matter if unblockable animated ads start getting placed around content in publications such as tablet apps.
I get all of my news from weekly magazines: The Economist, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.
May I ask:
What are the main benefits you get out of this quality journalism? Making you a better citizen/voter? Making you a better conversationalist? Making you a more moral person? Making you better understand the world so you can make better decisions (purchases and other life choices)? Making it possible to comment and impress your views on the public debate?
And what use do you make of the ads in these quality publications?
There's no cost that justifies making authors pay for their publications. All the work and cost occurs prior to having a finished paper, at which point it's just a PDF file that needs to be hosted and/or printed, the latter being optional in the internet age. The reviewing process is volunteer work and has no appreciable cost.
Correct. There's no cost that justifies making authors pay for their publications. But there is a value. Prestigious journals get read by the right people; few will come across a random PDF. It's just like an app-store. Apple and Amazon can extract a good cut because discovery is at least as important as app cost and quality. Other publishers of software, books, and stock images get away with even larger cuts.
Submitting to a quality journal is marketing yourself to the ends of fame, power, and profit. Scientists are
human.
But breaking away from an exploitative market leader is classic Prisoner's Dilemma. That's why there's all these attempts at collective action.
When people talk about paying for support in open source does not mean paying for someone to answer the phone and tell you how to use it. It does not even mean paying for training (although that can be a good business model too). It means paying to turn a product (software) into a solution (something that directly addresses a real need).
Quite right. The problem is that anyone can supply this service. Sure, the people who develop the software are often the best solution builders. But often the developers miss out on this work either because there's more work than the developers can handle, or because others can do it for less. The developers earn nothing from this work.
One consideration to think about is that the people who are recommending you release as open source may, in reality, simply be advocating for the ability to make customizations and build on top of the framework you're developing.
That's the most important benefit users get out of open software: the ability to tinker and to break away. And because it catalyses an ecosystem, the developer also benefits from making it easy for their software and its documentation to be extended.
If one's willing to break away from a pure FOSS licence, it's possible to retain these freedoms while making it feasible to charge for the software. All you need to do is to adopt a licence that (a), requires users pay a licence fee to run the software in a non-test system, and (b), requires those distributing a forked version pay that same per-copy licence fee back to you, keeping any premium their enhancements or marketing nous can attract. You not only get an army of developers riding your ecosystem, but an army of vendors trying to maximize awareness and sales. Not to mention happy users without that locked-in feeling.
If it's serious software put to serious use by entities with reputations to protect, you won't get too many dodging the licence fee, especially if you include a simple licence check/reminder facility that though easy to bypass (it's open source after all) still needs to be done as a conscious decision.
So I think the way to go is a licence that makes non-gratis libre software feasible, and which can support IOSVs (Indepenent Open Software Vendors). Here's one example.
I can have/. open in a window to the side, or in the background. I can tab over there when something is compiling or rendering or uploading, check a story or a few comments and switch back to whatever I'm really doing at the time.
That's one advantage of audio over text: one can consume it while working visually.
Perhaps SlashdotTV should become SlashdotRadio. Or the video player should have an "audio only" mode so that there's no wasted bandwidth for those who just want to listen.
In-stream audio ads should get Slashdot almost as good rates as the video ads.
Many websites have started steering people to video versions of news stories.
This is despite only some news items being highly visual. Online video news is gaining popularity not only because some prefer to consume information in a veg-out mode, but because video is a linear single-focus medium that is well suited to getting people to pay attention to its in-stream ads.
Slashdot Mirror
So older men may father more sick children. But they also father longer-lived ones.
How were the forum readers supposed to know a kid's train was coming to town for a weekend, if not for ads?
A forum user may post a report about their recent visit, read an article about it in a newspaper, may have received a direct letter or catalog (both ads, but not tangled with editorial), or spotted it in a classified section of a publication (I have less trouble with these than ads placed around content).
Ads, targeted to me, with stuff I might care about, are an effective way to message me. I don't have time to do random web searches... An ad is a quick and effective way for me to know something I might care about.
It depends if you're willing to put up with the 99.9% of ads that don't interest you, and doubt over whether to trust what those that do are telling you.
All content has an agenda.
True. But a benign agenda is to earn a living by telling as close as possible to the whole truth.
The best way to guarantee someone is working in your interests is to pay them the full cost of their work for you. But because people are willing to compromise on this price, they also must compromise on the truth. Ads in media are an extreme end of this tradeoff: free content surrounded by annoying lies. But there are alternatives in the middle.
That's a pretty accurate description of what I do. I don't work for anyone or promote one given company. The ads that people are there to see is the content of the site, and it is a subset of what it's trying to sell. But you can't get it on the "manufacturer's" web-site without paying for it. My site provides free samples. Think of people who might go to Costco on Friday just for the samples, and if they really like something in particular they might buy it. The only difference is, people usually don't perceive the content on my site to be an advertisement, and I'm in the very fortunate position where 99.99% of my competitors shove blatant ads and pop-ups down their surfer's throats. People tell me they come to my site because there are no ads.
I don't fully understand how your site works and earns income, but, as long as people aren't being deceived, helpful content and services over straight ads is definitely the wave of the future.
Earlier this summer I saw an ad for a "Thomas and Friends" train ride in a town an hour from here. Took my kids, they loved it. It was fun. How the smeg would I have even known about it without having seen an ad? You suggesting I should have randomly searched and spontaneously discovered it?
You could have found out about the train ride from reading an article in a publication or a post in a forum. You can be more confident of a good time if such an independent source say's that it's fun. The publication is rewarded for its work either by you buying it, or by getting an affiliate payment from the train ride for the help it gave to someone who ended up being a customer. Or an amateur online forum may just be run as a hobby, with goodwill and the odd donation the only rewards.
Or you may use a search engine to look for kids' activities, come across the train ride in an organic result (a website is a good form of advertising), or in the search engine ads (sure, the activities that pay the search engine the most will be the most prominent, but at least the ads are delivered to you on-demand, rather than pushed to you around other content).
I think the best well-known type of advertisement that's going in the right direction is product placement. It can be done poorly, yes and I know I am about to get a bunch of replies from people telling me that they always notice it and it ruins the program etc. But it *CAN* be done in a subtle way that blends with the program and does not detract, to the point where the viewer does not notice or care.
What sort of disclosure do you display on this sponsored content? Are users clearly informed they're ads? This suggests not:
...the people who visit my web-site have no idea that the entire site is one giant advertisement; in fact, people have complimented and praised me for not having any ads on the site.
As long as I'm told that certain content has an agenda, I agree that a coherent article or whitepaper is a much better ad than a banner.
The problem is that if I know it's an ad, I may as well read it on the company's own website, which I can be made aware of through a search engine ad or organic result (which requires me to be actively looking, and only search engines get paid), or through an ad on a site like your own (which I'm likely to block because they intrude and don't give me the full picture, only information from those who choose to advertise). Much better would be if I could learn about things through unbiased content written by you and your users, and you get paid through affiliate-like mechanisms.
Basically, I Adblock everything, but whitelist the sites I support.
Does the article submitter find these ads on whitelisted sites useful? Unless they're influencing his/her purchases, the sites in question won't benefit in the long run because both click and display pay rates have to eventually reflect this influence.
Sure ads can make you aware of things, but their sine qua non is to not tell the whole truth. There will always be a big supply of advertising because it's lucrative to spin, the problem is the demand for it is whittling away as advertisers and publishers go overboard, and because the Net has added better ways to research and learn about products.
I think advertising is still needed to allow businesses to get their message out when there isn't sufficient independent help available at an acceptable price. But advertising that interrupts media is among the worst types, just behind telemarketing and door-to-door.
The broadcasters are relying on the fact that many want to watch shows when they're first available, so that we can be in the loop with our friends and colleagues. If it wasn't for the social aspects of media consumption, most would be willing to be years behind the curve, cherry-picking the extensive and inexpensive back catalog. This water-cooler effect gives the broadcasters the market power to get away with their bundling, blocking the ability to purchase individual programs at their time of first release, which is encouraging piracy, They'll continue to get away with this until more program-makers finance and distribute their work independently.
Then we calculate the ratio of (ad expense)/(profit generated). For Google ads, this is about 1.6. For Facebook ads, it is about 0.2. Guess where we no longer buy ads?
Just to confirm: you're saying that for your wife's business, Facebook ads are 8 times more effective than Google ads.
Apparently, it all comes down to community.
This is increasingly true for all start-ups. Even if a start-up has no IP, and its platform can be easily cloned, it can be valuable solely from the users it's accumulated. VCs now look for at least one of the 3Ps: people, profit, and popularity. Get the people then find a business model to exploit them.
Advertising isn't meant to inform, it's meant to deceive in a way that goes right up to that line of lying -- but in theory not cross it. They often do cross the line into outright lies, and then our legal system has to kick in.
Yes, it's hard for ads to lie. But the sine qua non of advertising is to speak less than the whole truth. An ad is not going to tell you if there's a better deal than the one being offered.
So to choose wisely you either have to look at ads for a variety of options (including ads that aren't pushed to you, like product websites), or pay someone to help you. Pushed advertising is counting on us being too lazy, busy, or tight to do either.
...that whole model of forced advertising is going away. The writing is on the wall.
Yes as we get more affluent and rational we'll be less willing to trade our time watching ads for free or subsidised content, preferring instead to get relevant ads on-demand from search engines, or eschewing ads altogether and learning about things being sold from editorial content that unlike ads doesn't push an agenda by giving you less than the whole truth.
As it runs low on the fuel of poverty and irrationality that sustains it, advertising's currently passing through its bloated red giant stage. The core collapse is imminent. But the white dwarf remnant will remain a slowly diminishing beacon in our culture for many years.
Set your home page to "about:newtab".
That worked. Thanks!
I'm surprised that unlike Chrome the Firefox site launcher grid doesn't come up on new windows, only on new tabs. I'm most likely to use it in a new browsing context in a new window, rather than in a new tab which I mainly open for links within a site, or pages with a related use (e.g. documentation).
You'd also run into vocal minorities, which would be especially heavy as time wore on. John Q. Public doesn't really want to vote on every single bill or issue that arises, that's why he's happier with a republic than a direct democracy.
You could counter this by giving the representative one proxy vote for each citizen who doesn't cast a ballot on each issue. This would however mean that the representative stays in control unless 50-75% of citizens cast individual ballots on an issue. So you could tweak it to dial down the weighting of representative votes as participation rates increase.
The security of online voting doesn't concern me as much. There is however an insoluble choice between anonymity (the secret ballot) and making it easy to buy and sell votes. But attendance at a polling booth isn't a perfect system either.
Why would anyone pay to be lied to
Most of the lying isn't in the articles, it's in the ads. Particularly lying by omission, which is the sine qua non of advertising.
I can scan my eyes across newsprint 5 times as fast as I can across a computer screen. I see stuff in my newspaper I would NEVER have found online.
Unlike newsprint, digital publications have index pages with many headlines (sometimes with short summaries) that are separate from full articles. I find these much quicker to scan than a layout of complete articles, particularly when articles in a printed paper are surrounded with ads that can't be automatically removed like they can on webpages.
The problem is that I'm usually only interested in one article in a hundred, which makes it hard to justify a subscription over an a la carte model.
Quite right.
But given the small fraction of readers who actually see a particular ad in a freely-distributed publication, the smaller number who are interested in it, and the even smaller number who are influenced by it, it's understandable why many advertisers are migrating to the better ROI platforms of search engine ads and their own websites, squeezing the money available for editorial, which is our only source of purchase information that has at least has some chance of being free from spin.
You want subscription money? You're gonna deliver a product free of ads.
That's not going to happen with most newspapers and magazines. People won't pay extra for an ad-free experience when it's easy to ignore or block the ads. It may be another matter if unblockable animated ads start getting placed around content in publications such as tablet apps.
I get all of my news from weekly magazines: The Economist, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.
May I ask:
What are the main benefits you get out of this quality journalism? Making you a better citizen/voter? Making you a better conversationalist? Making you a more moral person? Making you better understand the world so you can make better decisions (purchases and other life choices)? Making it possible to comment and impress your views on the public debate?
And what use do you make of the ads in these quality publications?
There's no cost that justifies making authors pay for their publications. All the work and cost occurs prior to having a finished paper, at which point it's just a PDF file that needs to be hosted and/or printed, the latter being optional in the internet age. The reviewing process is volunteer work and has no appreciable cost.
Correct. There's no cost that justifies making authors pay for their publications. But there is a value. Prestigious journals get read by the right people; few will come across a random PDF. It's just like an app-store. Apple and Amazon can extract a good cut because discovery is at least as important as app cost and quality. Other publishers of software, books, and stock images get away with even larger cuts.
Submitting to a quality journal is marketing yourself to the ends of fame, power, and profit. Scientists are human.
But breaking away from an exploitative market leader is classic Prisoner's Dilemma. That's why there's all these attempts at collective action.
When people talk about paying for support in open source does not mean paying for someone to answer the phone and tell you how to use it. It does not even mean paying for training (although that can be a good business model too). It means paying to turn a product (software) into a solution (something that directly addresses a real need).
Quite right. The problem is that anyone can supply this service. Sure, the people who develop the software are often the best solution builders. But often the developers miss out on this work either because there's more work than the developers can handle, or because others can do it for less. The developers earn nothing from this work.
One consideration to think about is that the people who are recommending you release as open source may, in reality, simply be advocating for the ability to make customizations and build on top of the framework you're developing.
That's the most important benefit users get out of open software: the ability to tinker and to break away. And because it catalyses an ecosystem, the developer also benefits from making it easy for their software and its documentation to be extended.
If one's willing to break away from a pure FOSS licence, it's possible to retain these freedoms while making it feasible to charge for the software. All you need to do is to adopt a licence that (a), requires users pay a licence fee to run the software in a non-test system, and (b), requires those distributing a forked version pay that same per-copy licence fee back to you, keeping any premium their enhancements or marketing nous can attract. You not only get an army of developers riding your ecosystem, but an army of vendors trying to maximize awareness and sales. Not to mention happy users without that locked-in feeling.
If it's serious software put to serious use by entities with reputations to protect, you won't get too many dodging the licence fee, especially if you include a simple licence check/reminder facility that though easy to bypass (it's open source after all) still needs to be done as a conscious decision.
So I think the way to go is a licence that makes non-gratis libre software feasible, and which can support IOSVs (Indepenent Open Software Vendors). Here's one example.
I can have /. open in a window to the side, or in the background. I can tab over there when something is compiling or rendering or uploading, check a story or a few comments and switch back to whatever I'm really doing at the time.
That's one advantage of audio over text: one can consume it while working visually.
Perhaps SlashdotTV should become SlashdotRadio. Or the video player should have an "audio only" mode so that there's no wasted bandwidth for those who just want to listen.
In-stream audio ads should get Slashdot almost as good rates as the video ads.
Many websites have started steering people to video versions of news stories.
This is despite only some news items being highly visual. Online video news is gaining popularity not only because some prefer to consume information in a veg-out mode, but because video is a linear single-focus medium that is well suited to getting people to pay attention to its in-stream ads.