7 ms·

I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously) but the crazy thing we discovered is that the

• nedt 6mo ago
  Also the companies selling the ad platforms aren’t knowing their own technical documentation. They tell everyone you need to load JS as heavy and blocking as possible and collect as much user data as possible because they can’t read their damn documentation. That’s also why news pages always say ad only works with massive tracking, which isn’t true and not even that effective.
• superjared 6mo ago
  > we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop this is batshit insane, yet I believe it
  • likium 6mo ago
    "Parable of the broken window", except instead of preventing the kid from throwing the rocks, they hired a someone to catch the rocks midair.
    • WorldPeas 6mo ago
      though in this case it seems "the rocks were coming from inside the building"
      • c0balt 6mo ago
        Somewhere in the net of tubes of our AC we have a machine that produces rocks. They randomly shoot of the air vents, please install ballistic shields in front of the vents to stop them from hitting our customers.
        • monkpit 6mo ago
          The pelxiglas is cheaper than taking the system down…
    • bartread 6mo ago
      Which sounds insane until you realise that you’ve just described in outline something very like the iron dome missile defence system, which actually exists in reality. (And of course you’ll get no argument from me that it’s insane that such things need to exist at all, but such is the world we live in.)
  • evilduck 6mo ago
    I'll bolster it. I've worked on a site-you-have-heard-of. They were struggling and as a response they would change marketing leadership basically every year to try to find a new way to reach a new or different demographic. Every year the new marketing leader would say "we're not doing any of that previous idiot's strategy, as I am the one who knows best". And as each marketer tried to make their mark, 50 new Google Tag Manager script injects would appear. Now, whose job was it to remove the previous 200 Tag Manager scripts? Obviously the last guy's, because those were his experiments and he was in charge at the time so new guy was clearly not responsible for it. And at the end of the year, 250 Tag Manager injections would now exist and we would turn the page to reveal a new CMO. And thus ends the parable of how I put a wrapping feature flag on the code that added Google Tag Manager to the site so that I could display the effects of the insanity and demonstrate why the PageSpeed metrics were ass and why engineering couldn't fix it (in a way they would permit, anyways).
• btbuildem 6mo ago
  If I may, what was your vision? What were you aiming to replace the ads with?
  • giovannibonetti 6mo ago
    Micro-payments, probably
  • MyHonestOpinon 6mo ago
    I have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.
    • latexr 6mo ago
      Isn’t that Apple News+? Cheaper than $20, too. Alternatively, Libby is free (and yes, legal, though not available everywhere).
      • mikestew 6mo ago
        Isn’t that Apple News+? You would be correct, but...and I say this as a subscriber to Apple's "all-in-one" package...Apple News+ is in many ways garbage. Low-rent articles from publications whose time has long passed (looking at you, Popular Mechanics), with Taboola-grade ads interspersed (as Gruber said recently, how many 30-something blonde women need hearing aids?). That said, stay away from the front page and go straight to your selected publications, and it's a good deal with access to WSJ, LA Times, and what have you. You still get crappy ads (which I can't seem to find a way to block with PiHole), but the content is there. For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it.
        • chipotle_coyote 6mo ago
          "For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it" has been my take since I got it sometime last year. It's kind of remarkable -- the ads are absolute trash and the apps, while not bad, are a little weird in hard-to-define ways other than "Apple used to do better at this whole UI thing". But if you want just a handful of the paywalled publications it unlocks for you, it's a great deal.
• pinkmuffinere 6mo ago
  This is fascinating! Can you share more stories?
  • _doctor_love 6mo ago
    Not OP, but I’ll throw out that many large commercial websites don’t directly integrate ads themselves. Instead, they use a tag manager. Often, that tag manager isn’t managed by the technology department, and well-meaning marketing people continue to sign contracts and jam JavaScript into the front end. If there’s also not a good content security policy in place, ad networks quickly become unregulated, all sorts of strange ads come in, and it’s very difficult to control them. There are a lot of “MarTech” consultants out there that help clients essentially burn their tag manager to the ground, then build it from the ground up to work properly.
  • jes5199 6mo ago
    one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost? and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads
    • pinkmuffinere 6mo ago
      That is a really interesting idea! I immediately see some problems, and you probably already thought through these while working on it, but I'm curious to hear if there were good solutions, or if they were non-issues for some reason: - If it's a niche product, you can just "buy out" the ad space on the website. But if the phone becomes popular enough that the majority of a website's ad revenue comes through this route, there starts to be a bit of an extortion-like opportunity for the website owners. The website has an incentive to show _even more annoying ads_, with the knowledge that most users actually won't see the ads, but they'll still get paid as if they did. They can say "oh, we're adding 5 more banners, so you'll need to pay us 5x the amount you used to" - I also see problems from the other direction (from the companies purchasing the ad space). By paying a website _not_ to show ads, you're essentially buying ad space. But the other purchasers-of-ad-space will still exist, and will now be competing for a more limited amount of space. So prices should rise, as demand rises. And as prices rise, you'll have to pay the websites more to keep them ad free. This should converge to a new equilibrium eventually, but I wonder if you accounted for that? If you get significant market share, the new equilibrium would be really expensive, because you're essentially trying to out-purchase everyone.
• kittikitti 6mo ago
  Thank you for this insight. Even as a developer, I can easily lose track of all the trackers I've included in a webpage. Usually, if I see a tracker in the code, it's already obfuscated and I provide the benefit of the doubt to leave it in. It's only when I jump back into the ads management page where I'm able to get a better idea. Even then, the specific trackers are hidden behind a variety of menu items that can change every time. This post made me realize that I need a better strategy as things are getting ridiculous with ads. I used to be someone who didn't use ad blockers because some of them are botnets. It's just not the same anymore, as I would trust the botnets with my data over the advertisers.
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 6mo ago
    Even if its obfuscated, there should be a comment above it saying what it is. This is bad developer hygiene.
• browningstreet 6mo ago
  I had a site with some traffic and a popular, class-leading ad plugin for the platform. At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription. I got an email from the developer, which was kind enough, asking me why I was cancelling and if there was any feedback I wanted to share. I mentioned how complicated ad inventory, ad placement, and online ordering for hands-off customer self-service was. His question back was, "What's hard about it?" I couldn't even muster a reply.
  • VertanaNinjai 6mo ago
    Maybe there are some details missing here, but asking for more detailed or tailored feedback makes it seem like he cares and was willing to hear you out. Sometimes people are in their own industry for so long that they forget what their industry and tools look like to outside eyes. A simple menu to him could’ve been overwhelming for you as a quick example.
    • inopinatus 6mo ago
      Unsurprisingly, there's a representative XKCD. https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
    • pseudohadamard 6mo ago
      I ran into this a while back at a talk when the speaker used the phrase "perfectly ordinary sodium iodide gamma ray spectrometer". I pointed out to him afterwards that that's not something that most people would expect to follow "perfectly ordinary" in a sentence, and he explained that, yes, today you'd be using thallium-doped CsI or NaI scintillators instead.
    • kgwxd 6mo ago
      If the response is an exact quote, the tone is "you must be stupid." It doesn't convey caring and wiling to hear things, and if they can't understand that before sending it, it makes perfect sense that the product sucks, and it will only get worse.
• abrookewood 6mo ago
  That is just plain ridiculous. How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?
  • bandrami 6mo ago
    Oh Lord you need to take on some non-tech companies as clients if this surprises you. I've had clients who forgot they had a website and thought that monthly hosting bill was just for something to do with the back-office Internet connection.
    • abrookewood 6mo ago
      That is insane.
      • bandrami 6mo ago
        It was a janitorial temp company and they didn't really care about computers. Whoever had been their IT guy before me had made a pretty neat website that would let clients book cleaning staff and give them a birds-eye- view of upcoming staffing needs. It was marginally better than their existing phone and email based system but not enough to make them change it, and over years of saying "let's try it next quarter" eventually everybody forgot about it.
  • Eric_WVGG 6mo ago
    hi, I'm a dev who was working in journalism around thirty years ago and still has some connections. The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not. The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable. So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval(). They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard. (personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
• Aurornis 6mo ago
  > the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try I think this might be selection bias in your customer base. I've had some friends who worked at a local news outlet. The ads on their website were a big deal and they had a full-time position dedicated to managing internet advertising.
  • jes5199 6mo ago
    yes perhaps only the big players have this problem
    • Aurornis 6mo ago
      Other way around. Only the very small players have this problem. For big players, ad revenue is a big part of their business. Not a forgotten corner of their website.
• masterleopold 6mo ago
  [dead]
• snthpy 6mo ago
  Lol
• archon810 6mo ago
  Was your company called Scroll by chance, the one that Twitter acquired? When I ran Android Police, we were one of the largest Scroll users in the beginning and I was pretty upset when Scroll shut down. However, it never amounted to any meaningful revenue and was just a nice way to implement ad-free subscriptions across various sites. Other big sites used it too, like The Verge and Gizmodo and I thought it had some potential.