https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b...
As long as these pages have ads that display utterly gross images (if you doubt me, click the above link) that make goatse look like pure mindbleach, i'll keep blocking JS and ads.
I work in digital media. I get why publishers do it. But, sheesh, if you're resorting these ads that insult your audience in exchange for pennies, I think you need to reexamine your approach.
Had no idea there was a name for this shit! But of course there is. It's really sad that the most rotten apples have spoiled it for everybody. I was thinking recently about trying to set up a passive income website that makes money on Adsense, but got discouraged when I remembered that Adblockers are a thing.
Proper honest advertisements for actual products and services is something I have no issue with -- hell, I've actually managed to save money on car insurance because of a bloody online car insurance ad.
I despise stuff that autoplays video/audio, or moves around on the page, or displays creepy, pseudo-anatomical images engineered to trigger revulsion/fascination (trypophobia stuff or shit like those weird toenail images in those "heart attack" ads or whatever else).
My browser blocks JS by default because I don't enjoy seeing those kinds of shock images. Hell, goatse is less distressing for me to look at than the images in your average chumbox.
No, i get the trypophobia-triggering (DON'T GOOGLE THAT WORD) chumbox images when browsing in incognito mode, without pre-existing cookies or anything else. This has nothing to do with my ad bubble, https://theawl.com/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-chum-de0b... has mentioned that the chumboxes very often carry those images.
Also i'm not the only one, there's lots of other people who attest to the fact that chumboxes specifically use those kinds of images: http://ask.metafilter.com/247987/How-can-I-avoid-seeing-rela...
We have something in the neighborhood of 30+ ad partners. Some of those partners have decent code, others are really terrible. The IT team only adds the code to allow ad networks to inject their advertisements.
Because of the performance issues and the disreputable nature of some of the ad networks we have discussed the possibility of building our own ad server. However this takes time and money, I don't know the ROI of such an endeavor. Ultimately sale's job is to generate revenue so we partner with nearly every single ad network that can generate money. It's not desirable to deal with all these different ad providers, but you don't need me to tell you about the challenges the newspaper industry is dealing with. We need to bring in money on the digital side to make up the downward trajectory of print ads.
I actually purchased a subscription because I do want to support the paper but not deal with the nightmarish ads that make the site basically unusable. However after logging in, the site immediately demands that I disable blocking third party cookies. I've been in touch with the subscription department without luck, so at this point I am looking to cancel my subscription. Pity - I really wanted to support the paper, but they make it basically impossible to do so.
Your ad sales and IT team are killing your company. They are taking your good product, the journalism and your well written Javascript, and they are smearing a thick paste of shit all over it. Some of this shit is visible, like the grocery circular popover and the auto-loading video ads. Some of it is invisible, like the 10 megabytes/minute I blogged about. But that shit has a smell. Readers don't like getting shit on their hands when reading the newspaper. They don't like smelling shit. They will stop going to your website.
The ROI on cleaning up the ads tech mess will not be immediate. It will probably be negative in the short term. But in the long term it's the only way to save the newspaper. I'm anxious about the future of the newspaper business too and don't know what the solution is. But I'm sure it's not this ad escalation.
Exactly. Ever since the LA Times started blocking ad blockers, I do not visit it. If I accidentally click on a LAT link, I'm quickly reminded that I don't want to be there and close the tab.
That being said, I believe the media companies should start accepting the inevitable fact that people don't care about their financial struggles or hardships in finding ways to monetize content. As long as the said content is visibly free (even if it comes with strings attached as invisible tracking) then the people will continue to believe it's free and the more technical users like myself will go the extra mile to actively impede your tracking. You can't escape from that.
I would actually pay for good journalism. But as a possible consumer of the theoretical good journalism, I can't trust anyone. Every month there are news about very shady ads or nasty ransomware snuck through ad networks. How can I trust anyone who is after making money in the industry?
Both the ad and publisher industry have repeteadly shown their profits are their most important priority, not the readers safety. This is never gonna change, they must make money.
I can understand their motives but I have zero sympathy for them due to the methods they employ.
If they are smart business people, they have to sit and actively think of new and non-intrusive ways to monetize content, like right now. The current publishing and monetization models golden days are long behind them, all of the companies are fighting over scraps (obviously I can't prove this but I believe it's a legit theory, judging by the desperate methods) and the bean-counters should stop trying to beat this game and rather look for a new game.
There's also still physical newspapers. You could go up to your nearest little shop and, for just a few dollars really, try out a couple of the newspapers. You can get a different one every day, see how they compare, then you can subscribe to that one!
There, now you can pay for good journalism, and support that radical new monetization model.
As for physical newspapers, I hear they were decent once, but nowadays they're all so shitty around here that I believe one is better informed by not reading them, as at least it's easier to keep an open mind on issues, than after having been fed heavily distorted facts.
Wherever possible, I make it clear that this cruft comes at a cost, but I cannot recall a single client being swayed by those arguments. In the case of overlap between trackers (Analytics, Facebook, etc), from the perspective of the client, they solve their "problem" in a quick request. Either it appeases the marketing company or it gives them that little extra feature they think they need but will never use.
Increasingly, it can be miserable developing for anything other than my own projects because of how much time is spent implementing bad ideas requested by other people.
That's why I am thinking actively about starting my own small business lately. Or simply refuse to do web development at all and go into data science / A.I. / pattern extraction areas.
It seems like either of those would be excruciatingly hard to transition to (work inertia can be a blessing and a curse) but I want to do either -- or both -- because web development is in my eyes in its worst decline ever. I don't buy the optimistic BS from inexperienced JS devs or the promises of new tech. People still have to use user agent sniffing for their website to work best. Just lol.
Different ad networks use different provider's numbers to determine how much to charge for ads based on which traffic tier you're in. If you don't use them all, then you can't sell on that network, or you get a really bad CPM. And none of them seem to trust Google's numbers except Google, even though those are far more accurate than any other provider.
I'm dealing with Ensighten right now. A wonderful tag-manager (sarcasm) that lets anyone add any random 3rd-party script to all the pages.
Am finding services being loaded twice. From different URLs too so its not just a cache hit.
These sites all use a third party "tag manager" (Google Tag Manager, Tealium, Piwik etc.) to manage the scripts they load: ads, analytics, trackers etc. The people who use the tag manager typically aren't techies, so they don't understand that adding another tag will cause the page to slow down. Typically I've seen a single newspaper use 3-4 different vendors for the exact same thing, such as analytics. They don't actually use all of them; who knows why they have multiple overlapping ones.
Scripts are often badly written, and it's common to see lots of nonsensical errors spewed to the console. It's very annoying to debug your own stuff when you have that crap loaded, which typically comes from a header/footer combo provided by the customer.