What would happen if reddit had to use a ad network that vetted every single advertisement they displayed and took legal responsibility that local advertisement laws was followed? In my case there would be no advertisement towards children, no tobacco or alcohol, and no drugs or medical advice. There would naturally also be no scams or misrepresenting information. If we go as far as to the same standard as advertisement in a news paper, we also get no tracking. How much would reddit users have to pay in order for reddit to live on only the same rate as a printed paper get from advertisement?
Advertisement supported news papers are generally free so would it be possible that the reddit price would also be free?
First off, it's the target who wears the majority of the costs. Extra bandwidth to serve the ad, extra cpu/battery resources to display it, extra exposure to trackers and malicious js - all on the target.
Then there's the tracking. You don't just get shown an ad, your browser receives a huge payload of javascript intended to track your behavior on and off the site where the ad was shown. This allows large ad networks like Google to track you virtually everywhere you go online - the ads shown are almost irrelevant compared to the value derived from this data.
And finally, as parent post mentions, there's a complete lack of checks and balances. Anyone can advertise anything, which is why a huge portion of ads are for scams, and most of the remaining portion are for products and services that one cannot legally advertise on traditional media.
Given all of the above, I don't think it's at all unreasonable for consumers to block and continue blocking digital ads as long as it remains technologically possible. There is no legal recourse here - visiting a website doesn't imply consent to downloading and displaying that website how the owner wants.
There's this persistent sentiment of 'oh but if users continue blocking ads then these websites will go out of business'. Yeah? Then so be it. If their business model is only sustainable through fucking their users in the ass, and they will go out of business if consumers don't bend over, then they shouldn't exist in the first place. The internet was just fine before it was taken over by corporate interests, and it will continue being just fine if most of them stop operating there because they're can't monetize it. It's an information sharing platform, there was never a promise of it being a profit platform.
I somehow strongly doubt that if the current paradigm of ad based revenue were to disappear overnight, that no one would figure out something to take it's place and that the internet would become a barren wasteland devoid of content. As it is now, there is zero incentive for content developers to look for any other solution because the status quo is so ingrained in people's minds that we have just accepted it as "the way things are". This is very clearly starting to change, and so yes, there will be collateral damage in the mean time. But the Web that emerges from this change will be better for everyone involved.
Reddit users wouldn't care if Reddit went out of business? I find that hard to believe.
> Something will rise up to take your place that is more user friendly. The market will find a way.
Got any ideas? Nobody has come up with anything that works so far.
> I somehow strongly doubt that if the current paradigm of ad based revenue were to disappear overnight, that no one would figure out something to take it's place and that the internet would become a barren wasteland devoid of content.
What is this suspicion based on?
Sure they would. But if Reddit went out of business, a new Reddit would immediately take it's place. The value to be extracted from such a large user-base is too great for this niche to go unfilled. How that value would be extracted in an ad-free system is yet to be seen. But I have faith in human ingenuity.
>Got any ideas? Nobody has come up with anything that works so far.
That is precisely my point. No one has come up with any ideas so far because there is not sufficient incentive. The model that now exists makes money, so why would anyone try too hard to rock the boat? Sure there a few small bit players trying to change things. But these limited ideological efforts are completely different from the full brunt of a capitalist market seeking profits under constraints that completely disallow advertising.
I believe snowdrift.coop has a chance. (I'm a volunteer on the team).
Myspace, anyone?
It's just a matter of time before reddit dies as well. Unlike google or facebook, there's not much value that a user can extract from reddit.
Google with all their services still provide value to users.
Facebook, despite their privacy issues, still provides something of value to their users.
What does reddit provide which can't be done by an alternative?
Exactly this. The entitlement jedberg shows here, to be able to show ads on a link aggregator (of all useless things) is astonishing.
This crosses into personal attack and namecalling. Those things are against the HN guidelines. Would you please (re-)read them, and follow them when commenting here?
The internet gives everyone the freedom to create a community of their own, and it's easier, cheaper and the experience is better than ever when doing so. There are already popular "anything goes" discussion forums (e.g. 4chan, voat) that give much wider room to "freedom of expression", so how have companies like reddit or google prevented others from operating in any fashion they find acceptable within the confines of their own communities? The answer is they haven't.
Reddit is the only site where I've been banned off a single sub. And this was to correct an error referencing my own work and expertise.
As far as I can tell, they've gone overboard on their censoring, marketing and propaganda.
Or do you also think it's ok to steal from Walmart because you don't like their corporate policies?
Playing your ads in my browser is "the rules" now?
If you want to claim it's "the rules", you need a paywall.
Oh, you're not putting up a paywall? Fancy that.
Do you offer legally enforceable indemnity against people getting malware from ads you serve? If not, then you can't really tell them not to block the ads.
"The rules" in this case are that censorship and social control (presumably) exist on the platform. If you don't like that, don't participate.
But don't say, "OMG censorship" and use that to justify defrauding advertisers while continuing to use the free site that you deride.
You can protest legally by blocking ads, but there's such a thing as too much civil disobedience. Its a slippery slope, because this argument can be used to justify DDoS.
It still doesn't justify the topic at hand, which is a program that attacks the ad networks and defrauds the advertisers.
I subscribed to reddit gold for a year. Removal of ads wasn't a big benefit to me since, as you know, I could achieve the same with or without reddit gold with ad-blocking. There was obviously no point in me whitelisting reddit and then toggling the ads off in the settings. I was, however, happy to be supporting reddit.
However, in the end I've never purchased reddit gold again. I have been gilded a few times. I did whitelist reddit in my blocker again.
The reason for this was because I didn't see reddit improving much. No visible features were being launched (gold gated or general) that improved my experience, so it was hard to see what I was supporting. So I stopped.
On lots of others sites, it's clear that a subscription is for the content. Reddit is just the platform, though. In that case, gold was touted as additional features, some of which would be eventually be released for every user. I'm not sure how many features that happened for, but I can only recall hearing about one.
To be fair, this was years ago. However, nothing since has tipped me towards supporting reddit again and I don't think I'm likely to hop back onto gold anytime soon. Only recently has reddit started to appear to launch some stuff that would have kept me supporting reddit through gold. I'm sure I've been missing things as announcements these days seem to be spread out across many different subreddits that rarely hit the front page.
They are working on a site redesign though, so that is something
Can you charge people to use reddit? Not if you want to make money. I don't think people are willing to pay to use reddit. especially after the exodus that follows.
Some people consent to being manipulating into buying things, and reddit profits off of those people. Some people don't consent to that, but we still add value to the site by simply visiting, writing comments, voting, etc.
The math is clear. As long as enough people are willing to look at ads, you can't go to a paid only site without losing money.
The adblock users of the world thank those people, I guess, but that's just what it is.
You coopted the world's conversation into a private space where you could profit from it. This might seem OK in lala-land of silicon valley, but what you have done is horribly horribly wrong in that you've moved millions of people into a place where political views can be easily censored, and where groups like The Cabal can gain power over what is and is not seen by millions.
Reddit is broken. Everything about it is broken, the ad model, is broken. It is damage to humankind so large that routing around may not be enough.
This is quite an extreme conclusion to draw, as you seem to be overlooking one very large assumption: value.
If I say "I'd be willing to pay if a site removed advertising", that statement is still contingent on that payment providing me with value in return. I do pay for many sites and services on the internet. Reddit is not one of them. It's not a bad site, but for me, it's largely served as a distraction and hasn't really offered me anything I consider worthwhile enough to pay for. This does not equate to me being dishonest because implicit in that is your (incorrect) assumption that Reddit offers every visitor significant value.
" Consumers tend to respond much more strongly to “free” offers than to prices that are only fractionally higher than zero. When Amazon first offered free shipping in European countries, orders surged—but not in France, where by mistake it charged around ten cents.
Researchers talk of the “privacy paradox”: when asked, people say that they care much more about their privacy than their actions would suggest."
This leads to another issue. If governments and companies are making important policy decisions based upon data, is it fair or right to access their online behavior in addition to surveys, as people often lie in surveys to project a better image of themselves.
According to https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6pxyvy/traffic_pag..., about half of your users are mobile users of the official app, which does not support ad blocking, so at least half of your entire userbase either pays for gold, or has ads. Official statistics you’ve published put reddit at a reach of 6% of US internet users, which would be over 234 million users.
This would mean 117 million monthly users at 4 USD pre-tax each, which would be a monthly revenue that’d rival Google or Facebook. And this is completely ignoring any and all desktop users. So either your user statistics are wrong, or you don’t even get close to the 4 USD revenue per user in ads.
Based on the fact that Reddit officially isn’t profitable, and has 230 employees paid at Silicon Valley wages, and assuming reddit has a factor of 10 less users (so ~11 million mobile users per month, which would assume half of the subscribers to AskReddit would be active mobile users), the actual money you’d get per mobile user per month via ads (again, assuming all desktop users use adblock), would be around $0.21. This also matches much more closely the usual per-user ad revenue statistics.
And $0.21 per month is a price that also is a lot more affordable for people outside of silicon valley. Even a buck a month is still within of affordable range, although less so if you use many different sites. If you visit hundreds of pages per month, paying $4 each would bankrupt people. And no, you don’t get the same revenue via ads either (as explained above, or can be determined via the simple equation that the entire revenue sites you’re visiting make from ads has to be less than the disposable income you spend on products per month).
The population of the U.S. is about 320 million, including children and non internet users, so how can 6% of US internet users equate to over 234 million users?
Reddit operates in many countries, but the data Reddit published on their blog a few months ago named both of these numbers. Which is... interesting.
The simple fact is that if people don't have to pay for something, most of them won't. And that makes plenty of sense.
For example, for me, as a user, IRCCloud is far too expensive, because for half the monthly cost I can run a Quassel core (an open IRC bouncer with similar functionality) for 10 users.
So, to me, I have a choice between 4 bucks a month for a product, or 0.20 bucks a month for the same product.
A big issue with this are the silicon valley wages. Most of these services are priced for users in Silicon Valley, where 5 bucks a month are nothing.
But out in the rest of the world, money is worth a lot more, and as a result, the entire cost/use equation changes, making many of these products impossible to afford.
Not that running a news organization is inexpensive. But I'm extremely skeptical that any one site is making $9.99/month off of my ad impressions.
I've been gilded more than a few times and I've never come to know until the expiry notice shows up.
So it's actually hard to tell what the reddit gold buys one, apart from virtue signalling that one is a "supporter."
Now if the gold bought me to ability to turn off all comments, see what the mods have censored off the various subs, and actually extract some value off the site, I'd pay up in a flash.
But as it stands, reddit has lost any credibility that it ever had, and logging in that toxic mess provides no value to me and too much value to reddit.
In short, not a site worth supporting in any shape or form.
You can turn off comments by not visiting comment pages
What annoys me about reddit comments are the pun "trains," endless reruns of old reddit jokes. Every conversation is swamped with these comments, perhaps deliberately, to drown out unpopular opinions. No wait, the Pao era introduced mass deletions instead.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conte...
I wouldn't be surprised that happened ultimately, but I really don't think that she was hired with that role/goal in mind. No one could be that evil. Could they?
If you look at the history of reddit over the years, they've always lurched from one crisis to another. An absence of adult supervision. Reactive solutions.
I would bet that reddit was under pressure to monetize somehow and ads (a la Facebook) on that "community" wouldn't cut it. I believe that they had an influx of funds around the same time, and the investors were looking to start getting some returns.
Their various stealth marketing schemes were suffering at the hands of the entrenched trolls. The unsavory subreddits were probably putting off established customers.
Maybe Pao just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
yishan's comment is interesting, thanks for linking to it. I didn't follow the whole Pao affair, but I do remember someone telling me that yishan might have been trolling reddit.
One thing jumps out at me from his comment. He calls Pao "the only technology executive anywhere who had the chops and experience to manage a startup of this size, AND who understood what reddit was all about."
Technology executive? Really? That's news to me. I thought she had spent her pre-reddit days in finance.
And she definitely did not understand reddit.
I worked for years as a webdev with mid-tier ad nets until last ones of them either went out of business or turned into niche players. We worked with "cube data" of people that had over 160 different parameters back in 2012-2013. The amount of data about an average internet user is huge, but nearly all of it is useless for a top tier ad player.
Google and few remaining top tier players take their "tax" on all kinds of ads that go through their platforms regardless of targeting efficiency and conversion rates. That is a lion share of value you can squeeze from a click. They let other "platform partners" to fight for remaining scraps. If DSPs and SSPs bring more clients and clicks or can somehow improve on the process, top tier players will only benefit from higher volumes.
However, the personally identifiable data sold by data vendors is of immense value to people running arbitrage schemes on ad exchanges. See, if you can price shows just few percents better on average than the rest of the ecosystem you make a lot of money. You bid for "garbage impressions (that's the industry's term)" in hopes to get expensive clicks for stuff like financial crap, RX, lawyers, amazon, "quasi-CPA" tagged clicks, and so on.
This type of business attracts a lot of rich "idle rentier" types. Naturally, those guys tend to "vote with their money," if they see that a certain arbitrage scheme is no longer profitable, and another one is. This is why there is so much of contention about such data, and cutthroat efforts to get it. I knew not one, but two RTB arbitrage collectives in Russia that had their RTB trading servers stolen from secure datacentres.
90% amateur blogs make no money what so ever over the cost of running them. Smart bloggers switched to affiliate schemes ages ago. Amateur bloggers making money of ad shows will go out of business sooner or later, regardless of adnauseam or adblock. Running ads is simply not a suitable business model for such guys.
Well why would I do it if I don't have to?
I'm happy to pay for Netflix because there are no ads and it's just a better more convenient product than torrenting is.
You absolutely don't. But if you say, "I would pay you to get rid of ads", and then I get rid of them and you don't pay, that makes you a bit of a hypocrite, no?
Yes, they do it on purpose. Have you researched why? Is this a symptom and not the problem itself?
:)
Let me add a little perspective. A long time ago at reddit we launched reddit gold. At the time, one of the biggest benefits was that if you had gold you could turn off ads. This was in direct response to people saying, "I would rather pay you then use adblock".
You know how many people running adblock started paying? Not a lot. Sure, some did, but there were still a whole bunch of people who just wanted a free experience. The ads on reddit weren't even all that heavy CPU and bandwidth-wise.
My point is, I don't think a lot of you are being totally honest when you say you'd be willing to pay if the site removed advertising.
In a lot of cases, those sites get a lot more money from the advertisers than you would ever be willing to pay, because they simply don't provide that much value to you.