Comments on: An Ad-less Internet

By: Ivan

Ivan — Sat, 29 May 2010 01:25:52 +0000

I agree. Leave the user in control and everything will be OK.

Even if the user normally might be interested in an ad, he probably won’t interact with an intrusive ad just out of spite… At least that’s the way I react

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:42:51 +0000

Ryan, the problem is that ads (not necessarily Flash but regularly) are often deliberately obnoxious to get the user’s attention, obscure content (sometimes overlaying the whole page), are poorly written (eg. memory leaks) and can increase page load time by 10x or more. Are users meant to believe that if they stop using ad blockers, advertising companies will fix all these issues? How about the online advertising industry develops a code of conduct that recitifes these issues (maximum file size, memory usage, does not obscure content, etc)? Until then, I’ll continue to use ABP and FlashBlock (even though I’m a Flex dev).

By: ryanstewart

ryanstewart — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:44:51 +0000

@Jules, you’re absolutely right about the comments. The problem is that the DNA of the tech industry seems to be baked to hate advertising and also hate paying for content. That just isn’t sustainable.

@Brandon, we’re working on some things that will slow down instances of the player running in background tabs. I think that’s a nice mix of letting advertisers experiment but only making it work on the active page and not sucking up CPUs on pages you aren’t looking at.

@Mitch, I love that angle. Think about advertising being part of the DOM and manipulating the whole thing

By: leef

leef — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:27:42 +0000

@Jules

I’m not saying advertising should be or will ever be done away with. I am saying advertisers must become more sophisticated in deciding when & where to advertise. The wrong ad in the wrong place at the wrong time does more harm than good to the product in my opinion. How is the experience of spam in your inbox any different than spam on your television or youtube? I anticipate the value of spamvertising will drop over the years and be replaced by effective contextual info-advertising. But maybe I’m overly optimistic.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:16:50 +0000

Just think how even more obnoxious advertising could become when it can potentially interact with the entire page and isn’t relegated to the flash layer…

By: Brandon Ellis

Brandon Ellis — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:09:25 +0000

Hey Ryan,
Would be nice it there was a framework that handled the page execution of ads. Ads could be marked with rel=”advertisement” and placed in a cue that could stagger the loading. That could help identify which ad producers were optimizing and who is holding up the game.

I do believe the bigger culprits in making page loads bottleneck are Google Analytics and the social media APIs.

I already have GA and api.facebook.com pointing to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file and it makes a world of difference.

By: JulesLt

JulesLt — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:07:07 +0000

The problem with what even leef is suggesting is that it’s still dependent on a correlation between audience, product, and sales driven off that advertising. There isn’t always one.

In traditional print publishing, it was still viable to produce a magazine that wasn’t ad-dependent (i.e. most titles serving niche audiences – if they offer advertising it’s generally cheap and serving a niche audience – you can’t charge a lot for an ad that reaches 4000 people). What you could do is put the cover price up.

The problem on the web – and particularly looking at the comments on the Ars piece – is that there’s this huge number of people out there who are financially delusional. They hate advertising . . . but they hate paying even more. Which is fine if you stick to your guns and only support amateur content – what’s delusional is the attitude that taking a free ride on the dumb paying masses is sustainable.

By: leef

leef — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:40:55 +0000

I hope blanket advertising dies, and is concretely replaced by contextual-info-advertisements. Random ad’s are more like spam than anything else. Has anyone ever purchased Progressive car insurance under the influence of ads like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrtMM5suUCg

Every night I lie down with the following prayer, “Dear Eywa hear my voice (brought to you by Crest). May the future be lit with highly targeted contextual informational ads, and the age of annoying spamvertised ads, like these forever be banished to exile.”