Forbes has come a long way down since the days of Malcolm Forbes, Sr. He did many exposes of bad business practices. Forbes is now owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments of Hong Kong.
If you're not that familiar with how ad serving works today, watch this IAB video.[1] Note how the online auction process works. After information about the user (location, demographics, income level, previous purchases, what user has looked at) has been obtained from a data provider, that info is submitted to an ad exchange. Advertisers then have an opportunity to bid for placing an ad in that space, and have 10ms to bid.
But sometimes, no advertiser bids in that round. The ad space is now "remnant space" - ad space where all the big advertisers declined to buy. Remnant space is very cheap, maybe 5% of premium space. The first ad exchange goes out to a second lower-tier ad exchange, where the cycle repeats, at a lower price point. That's where junky ads and malware get inserted. Remnant-space sellers include Rubicon, PubMatic, and AdMeld (now owned by Google).
Many publishers are reluctant to set a minimum price and leave ad space unsold. Rather than fill unsold space with some non-ad content, or a house ad (Forbes running an ad for some other Forbes publication), they sell the space to one of those bottom-feeder services. This hurts their reputation and readership, and probably isn't worth the small revenue it generates.
Forbes covered the issue of ad exchange trust in 2014.[2] Their ad people need to read their own magazine.
For some clarification (as I've worked in the ad industry for years)
1) Advertisers (actually their ad agencies) use software called a DSP to connect to ad exchanges and bid on each impression. They have 100-250ms depending on the exchange's rules.
2) This kind of Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is used for both premium space and unsold/remnant inventory. The separate "rounds" is going away and there's a rapid movement to do a unified auction for each impression with all possible ad buyers (premium to cheap) in a single auction.
3) Lots of publishers do actually set a price floor but this is far more complicated than binary yes/no for a floor. There's a lot of math/science put into the online ad auction and yield management space.
4) Many networks don't use RTB and are safe from this.
5) This malware issue isn't because of adtech (the tech part) but rather the incentives and lack of regulation and enforcement. Lots of politics and mistrust has required tons of javascript tags just to render a simple banner, and as we all know, js can do just about anything so it immediately gives a bad advertiser power to do whatever they want. This is something being worked on with some newer formats. There's also no consequences of "getting caught". Most ad networks and bad advertisers are not big corporations but little companies in other countries that can just change names and come back in a few days to do it all over again.
Being that I make money from serving ads, I come at this a bit differently. In a lot of markets, it's one of the most passive ways to make money, but to be sure, the creepiness factor has been advertisers' hubris-induced-downfall.
In any case, I haven't seen anyone here mention the ad networks themselves. Every once and a while we would get a complaint about a bad ad - it wouldn't dismiss, etc. Over time, we whittled down our network list to ad networks that strictly test and vet the ads they serve, no matter how much time that takes.
The networks blaming a "rogue advertiser" means they're not even passing ads on their network through automated malware detection software, and so they have responsibility here.
Creepiness factor aside, the explosion of networks is a problem, because so very few are actually providing more than a basic service. We really should be holding networks responsible for their ads.
We did, and we haven't had a complaint for a very long time.
Edit: this doesn't absolve Forbes, especially if they did nothing to correct the problem.
Edit 2: by "we should hold the networks responsible" I mean "we the publishers" - and as that "we" we still have a responsibility to our users/consumers. See Edit 1.
The problem isn't advertisements per se, the problem is advertisement networks that track users and sell their profiles. The only thing I have installed that counts as an ad blocker is Ghostery. I still get served advertisements at conscientious websites like duckduckgo.com or any other place that doesn't rely 100% on tracking networks.
Imagine if simply because you walked into Target, they hired a private investigator to follow you around and determine your personal habits, hobbies and other stores you visited. Imagine if they then used that information to attempt to lure you into the store, or sold that information to Best Buy so they could lure you into the store. I think most people would have a problem with such behavior. Making a more realistic physical analogy would be slipping an RFID token into your wallet without you noticing and only tracking you in stores that use the corresponding RFID reader.
In my opinion, tracking networks go the extra mile beyond a creepiness factor. My visit to your website isn't tacit approval for you to peruse my browsing of other websites. I shouldn't need to opt out of this behavior by installing Ghostery in the first place.
Individual profiles are rarely sold directly[1], but some demographic is taken so that the publisher can sell your traffic at a higher rate. This is a good thing because it means they can make more money with less traffic, which in turn means that they don't have to appeal to anybody and everybody. This is (hypothetically) where quality content comes from.
Unfortunately most of the ad industry is really crap at this.
For example, Oracle/Bluekai leak `var bk_results` into the web page allowing anyone to pick up this data which means that this information can (and is) often used for much more than just better ads.
[1]: One notable space where they are sold is ABM. Unless you're a decision maker for an enterprise supply budget, this isn't you.
It is odd to see advertisers speak of tracking so casually. Tracking is still new. Up until a few years ago (like 3) the majority of the industry (by money) did not track users. A huge, but admittedly declining, segment still don't.
Billboards do not track. TV ads do not track. Physical shop fronts do not track. Radio ads do not track. And a great many website still sell space to people selling actual products, rather than banner ads, which bypasses all adblockers.
There are plenty of ways to get your message out, and make money in return, without inventing new supercookies for me to ferret out of my system.
Both Outdoors and Television do the same by-demographic buying/selling, in fact, that's where the Internet got it! Outdoors and Television don't track (except when they do[1]) because they don't need to; because there exists a huge problem with digital that doesn't exist for Outdoors and Television: Ad Fraud.
There are a lot of websites out there with a lot of (aggregate) traffic, but that individually don't have enough traffic to approach advertisers directly. It is good that we can monetise them because sometimes this can fund their niche content, however it also means that people can make fake websites and trick advertisers into buying that space.
Of course, real users don't go to those sites, which is a nascent use for tracking: Sites that are visited by some population who don't visit other sites are simply more suspicious.
[1]: Precision Marketing (for example) has data on billboards collected from mobile devices. Many OTT and SmartTV devices send tracking data as well.
Yes to both, but I am suspicious about most of the mathematics used to prove uplift and conversions using micro-models because of simple counter-examples like the blank ad[1] that generated a median clickthrough rate, and because of the prevalence of one-tailed "dropoff" charts don't pass the laugh test.
For more on this phenomenon, there's a book[2] that I'm oft to recommend.
Nevertheless, I also believe there are genuine means for revenue that utilise user tracking, but this is more work and attention than the typical digital ad campaign receives.
TV ads can track using inaudible watermarks picked up by other household devices (especially apps running on phones; arstechnica wrote about this). Probably similar with radio ads.
Physical stores track using Wifi, Bluetooth, and cellphone signals. Billboards could conceivably do the same.
The world is creepier than most consumers imagine, and it needs to stop.
A competently-designed out of home ad setup will probably at least make an attempt to track its audience, often by doing some sort of telemetry to your smartphone or by literally photographing you as you pass by. [0-1] I don't work for these outfits but a lot of people erroneously believe the "billboards don't track" claim.
TVs may not track yet, but phones or PCs are already tracking the TV ads people are watching:
"Beware of ads that use inaudible sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC. Privacy advocates warn feds about surreptitious cross-device tracking."
Of course a smart TV tracks you. That's why the manufacturer made it (to earn money from you over its lifetime). The other features it has are just the bait on the hook.
Which is why I tell everyone to avoid SmartTVs and instead use some form of media player to support networking. It means yet another remote, but given that my TV remotes have already been usurped by my isp-provided decoder box. (Also a good idea as players are cheaper to replace than TVs.)
Do you ever feel that companies that do online advertising are not the best use of your talents? Is there no choice in life? Nothing better to work on?
I've been working on news sites for 7 years. I rarely comment here, but that's a good question.
1. No, I think the opposite. One of the reason that Internet advertising has gotten to this point _because_ smart people don't want to work on it.
2. The history of mass media is tied to the history of advertising. I know its trendy to say things like "the market will innovate" followed by no new ideas. This isn't the answer. The answer is to fix web advertising's problems.
3. I love the writing. I think it matters. I meet people who read my sites all the time and they agree. The survival of this depends on solving a series of really difficult, interesting problems.
Re 2., of course "the market will innovate" is bullshit. The market is perfectly fine with the status quo. Moreover, the market is a system that optimizes for efficiency of making profits and only for this. All those complains about ads are in fact complains about the market being too efficient at extracting profit from users. If we want to use the power of the market to fix abusive ads, we need to destroy their profitability.
At the same time, there are some clearly talented authors of networking code working in advertising (well, at least one). Impressive.
I cannot comment on the idea of "markets" but I can offer an opinion about people. If they can work on what they _want_ to rather than what they believe they _are forced_ to, I think that's cool.
Dennis Ritchie once said in an interview he could have chosen to work on calculating missile trajectories or some similar "difficult, interesting" problem, but instead he chose not to, and ending up working something like C.
I'm not sure anyone asked him to volunteer that information, he just did it. If my curiousity oversteps a line, I apologize. I wish I had the programming talent that I see some people (few) have and I just wonder what it must feel like to have that talent.
I own a small, independent mobile games company. If you can figure out how to get people to pay for games (without resorting to psychological trickery like Candy Crush) you could make millions.
I'd love to run a pure paid model and rip out the bloat and headaches of advertising SDKs, but I also have employees who count on a paycheck and like working on games, and app stores that foster a race to the bottom and highly promote free games over paid.
So I'm pretty happy with my place in life right now.
Keep chasing that dragon. Mobile games aren't much more than ringtones. Take note of how much time you spend marketing and whale-chasing v how much time is spent on the actual game.
KSP, Subnautica, Prison Architect, Minecraft, Don't Starve ... there is plenty of money being made by independent studios once you get off the mobile merry-go-round.
This is incredibly, offensively tone deaf. Our biggest game is over 5 years old, we spend 95% of our time on it on features and improvements, and we don't have in-app purchases (besides the ability to buy away ads) so we could care less about whale chasing. Millions of people play, our retention is at the top of the market, and we make 95% of our money advertising because less than 2% of players are willing to part with $1.99 to turn off ads (but many play for years).
Please don't make assumptions or comments about things you don't actually have experience with.
Lol, no experience. I've lived through the mobile gaming thing. I've seen clients rise and fall, and cry, because of the ridiculousness that is selling games on phones. It is dragon-chasing. It's all about trying to pry pennies out of people for tiny little games. 1.99? Right there is another silly marketing trope, as if that penny would ever make a difference for a careful consumer.
that t:T[t;"key";leaf] can be used to store a leaf in the trie, and t@/"key" can be used to look up the key in the trie.
Unfortunately, at least on my 1.7Ghz i7, with 8-byte keys, bin remains faster until around 1m records, and the difference remains negligible until you have more like 10m records.
By all means, get in touch. I'm always interested in hearing about better things to work on.
The problem isn't advertisements per se, the problem is advertisement networks that track users and sell their profiles.
I'm not sure what is gained by changing the subject like this, but I think at the end of the day we can agree that websites are allowing the ad networks they use to have nearly-unfettered access to your browser, and that this is a problem among several.
Why should the advertisement networks be the sole responsible when it is the publisher that subcontract the activity of delivering ads to visitors? The responsibility for distributing malware should be shared between each party that earn revenue from the illegal activity, which include the publisher, the network and the criminal. Passively earning money on criminal activity should not be the primary method that content creator earn money.
I also find it very problematic that offline advertisement are held to a much higher standard and required to follow local laws, while web based advertisement can even get away with distributing malware without repercussions.
Right, but why do you stop there and blame Forbes and not e.g. Google -- the company that let the attacker upload the malware?
It's very hard for a publisher -- even one as big as Forbes to hold Google accountable for anything. The fact that most people have such a fundamental lack of understanding about how digital advertising works doesn't help either.
The reality is in fact very simple. Ultimately, the buck stops with Forbes. They're the ones who decided to serve ads, they've made the decision to do it without their oversight - so they're the ones to be held responsible if the ads start spreading malware.
It's publishers, not us, who can and should exert market pressure on ad networks to change.
Ultimately the buck actually stops with the end user. They're the ones who decided to ask a server outside of their control for any and all data it has stored at an address and then used it in a way harmed themselves. It very much is us who can and should exert market pressure on ad networks to change. The publisher, ad network, ad creator, any and all business, only exists to satisfy our needs and wants. We are the market not publishers.
Oh, but we do. We install ad blockers. That's the best way to exert that pressure from our side :).
> The publisher, ad network, ad creator, any and all business, only exists to satisfy our needs and wants. We are the market not publishers.
You'd wish. We are as much a market as dogs are the market for dog food. They're not, dogs don't have money. Dog food is marketed to human owners. And so it's publishers who are customers of ad networks.
>Oh, but we do. We install ad blockers. That's the best way to exert that pressure from our side :).
That's exactly what I meant haha. I find the constant barrage of news about how terrible ads are baffling. There's a very simple solution for end users and it's been around for a long time.
>They're not, dogs don't have money.
We do have money. That's what they want from their ads, our money. Don't view ads -> don't click ads ->don't spend money on advertised products -> problem solved.
As a casual browser I can only blame the site that "served" me, good and hard. I have no idea what network or subnetwork ultimately served the malware/ad.
And since the visited site is the one that came into my "home," it's entirely appropriate to hold the site's feet to the fire.
When a site becomes well known for holding itself responsible for what comes out of the site, and doing it effectively, I'll whitelist them.
Who said anything about passively earning money from illegal activity?
I'll clarify - by "we should hold networks responsible" I mean "we the publishers" - that doesn't absolve our responsibility to the consumer. The fact is, the overwhelming number of ads online are free from malware, to a large number of 9s-decimal places. Still, networks need to vet the ads they serve. That's something they _can_ do that publishers cannot.
The publisher has the same ability to vet the advertisement that a subcontractor delivery, that a company has to vet the construction material when subcontracting the construction of a building. If publisher were held responsible, they would only deal with advertisement network that are held economically responsible if advertisement they deliver breaks the law. That mean higher costs, less revenue, but an end to the wild west we currently have.
If I buy a paper based newspaper, the ads on those follow a very strict set of local laws. Each time an illegal ad is mistakenly printed, its news that other papers just love to write about. If I buy a online subscription, none of this laws are in place, and to the same large number of 9s-decimal places that you talk about, the illegal ads will be on the online version.
This is patently false. We have zero ability to vet ads as a publisher without spinning up an entire as sales department larger than my entire company. The networks we use can and do vet the ads before serving them.
Of course, you're right. It's actually very simple. You as a publisher need to verify ad networks. Ad networks should verify their ads. It's your responsibility as a publisher to find ones that do it properly. Because I, as an user, don't care about the byzantine world of advertising. I deal only with you, and if you serve me crap, I don't care if it's your subcontractor's fault. It's an implementation detail. I blame you, because I interface with you.
And you are absolutely right. We can't pass along responsibility and feign ignorance. It did take a while for us to do it right (whittle down the networks we use to the best and most responsible) and that did take some relationship building - but I'm sure glad we did.
The networks we use can and do vet
the ads before serving them.
You know this for every ad for each network... exactly how?
If they failed in this duty, would you be informed?
Do they have a duty-to-defend clause in your agreement with them such that if you are sued for serving malware in your app, the network will pay all costs for your defense and all necessary restitution?
There's a sour "we were only following orders" flavor to such an indifferent stance.
"Holding networks responsible" sounds great, but the money chain isn't transparent, so whether you hold them responsible or not is irrelevant: Users hold you responsible if they see your URL and have a bad day.
That's what I said - Forbes needs to hold the networks responsible. Obviously the consumer can't, and as I said in the edit, that doesn't absolve Forbes.
Also I don't spend any time on my personal website these days. I haven't checked in on it in months...
I wasn't disagreeing with you: Forbes absolutely should hold the networks responsible, because we hold Forbes responsible. However, the consumer can hold the networks responsible: they just install an ad blocker. :)
There's also a subtle problem of mistrust in all this.
Ad creatives have evolved from just simple banner images to more rich media but those files are relatively safe. The biggest problem is the explosion of javascript tags used for verification and analysis because a lack of trust and politics has led agencies/advertisers to require layers of external tracking.
This requirement has forced ad networks to support 3rd party javascript tags - which is basically impossible to verify for security. If you can run javascript on a page, you can control that page.
Fundamentally there needs to be more regulation, standards and actual enforcement to fix this.
The problem with saying "switch off adblocker or no article" is that so many people are using adblockers, that those websites face an inevitable decline in influence if they continue that way. Because, despite what they say, it's not just about the money: it's the ability to influence the debate, whatever it might be. To have your editorials taken seriously and widely quoted. To make people listen. They're losing that ability, together with readers and revenue.
Forbes started having rando bloggers post articles to part of their website a couple years ago. I guess they wouldn't have done that if they thought they were taken particularly seriously. One possibility is that they decided to get what they could out of the name while it was still worth anything.
Back in the Malcolm Forbes days, Forbes was one of the big three US business magazines--the others being Fortune and Business Week--and it was quite good. It was my favorite of the three and I subscribed to it for a number of years.
It started declining at some point after Malcolm's death and for the past few years in particular the online site has really sold its soul for clicks. Some of its bloggers are decent but a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another and/or are more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct. And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial.
There are many more writers on Forbes now than 5 years ago. You might not like them all. They may not all be of the same, high caliber. None of them are "randos" as the parent comment noted; they all come in with a body of work and a reputation and are vetted by editors.
> a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another
That hadn't been the case. With hope, it's still not. There are ~disclosures linked from every byline. There are points of view and interests, to be sure. Those interests should be at least as transparent as they are for Fortune, Business Week, The New York Times, et al.
> more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct
Well-said. This has been the trajectory of news, entertainment, and the media in general for many decades. The web has helped accelerate it, but it's not proprietary to web publishers.
> And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial
That's by design and intended to be so in a positive way: "don't just pitch products at me, but give me information I'll find useful or entertaining even if it does suit your agenda." My disclosure is I worked on BrandVoice and similar programs; I'm no longer with Forbes. My strong opinion is all media have forms of this ad/edit line-blurring via product placement, advertorial, sponsorships, and combinations of them all. (more on that https://medium.com/@sjkmcnally/you-call-e-t-a-movie-but-ther... )
re the parent post, advertorial is one way publishers are making some money and, in part, paying writers to bring you news and entertainment. It doesn't directly involve malware and usually not even ad networks. It's not intended to disrupt reading experiences -- like pop-ups, take-overs, & pre-roll -- and all the tools are there for advertisers to disclose conflicts and provide some thoughtfulness & value to people who engage with it. When that's not the case 100% of the time, it's about specific executions rather than corruption of the concept as a whole.
So I went to Google, searched "Forbes", clicked "news" and then picked something I thought looked rando. Here's a personal finance/savvy consumer contributor that certainly isn't well known extolling lottery mysticism:
(wow are there a ton of distracting ads on that article ...)
Is this an example of conflict of interest? Or just of less-than-substantial "personal finance" content? The Contributor's bio has her bona fides and point of view. http://www.forbes.com/sites/vanessamcgrady/ She's not Charlie Munger, but he didn't start out as Charlie Munger, either.
The article is timely and relevant. "Powerball" in the article title is going to get play -- there's a multi-state, $900MM jackpot at stake tonight.
Many Contributors are paid for the traffic they drive. Most Contributors like it when their stories are widely-read. Managing those incentives, the quality of content created, the creators themselves, and their reputations is an ongoing process for the Contributors, editors, and publishers involved.
No doubt you could find more-glaring examples of less-than-substantial stories. One of my points is I'm glad this Contributor has a platform to create and publish her stories and build her community and career.
Right, it's junk click bait designed to serve a pile of ads.
I think it's awful that people are building a career by pretending that you can do better at the lotto (that's why I called it mysticism, you can't do better at the lotto).
Someone who bills themselves as helping people be savvy consumers should be pointing out that the statistics for Powerball are basically insurmountable, not having fun pretending that there are ways to beat them. That doesn't mean I didn't buy a couple tickets for fun, but I also didn't spend a lot of time figuring out what numbers will work best to beat their random number generator.
Got it. Your point was about randos, general editorial quality and caliber, and being taken seriously.
Specific decisions were made a few years ago about adding a distributed editorial workforce -- a Contributor network -- to the full-time editorial staffers. This was not a universally-beloved decision at the time. It has been a very successful one for Forbes.
My take on the basic thesis is there are more credible, authoritative people with stories to tell than could reasonably be hired as full-time staffers. Adding those voices under Forbes' brand helps scale content creation, community, and revenues. It also provides the ability to identify and nurture talented creators.
Despite Forbes' Contributor network being relatively high-touch, bringing on 1000+ new writers is going to be dilutive by definition. Historical editorial models and workflows are about command and control; scaling a contributor network is about ceding some of that. More of my take on what this success has done to Forbes' "serious business identity" is here https://medium.com/@sjkmcnally/reach-and-revenue-vs-dilution...
The ability to identify and manage the Contributors and their contributions is built into the platform and processes around it. No one should get or stay in the ecosystem who shouldn't be there.
Specifically re this Powerball piece, I mostly agree. I know some people will enjoy it even if others do not. I would not expect people to borrow against their 401k for lotto tickets because of it. I don't know if or what changes should be made to it. Luckily, that's someone else's issue to handle.
There are a bunch of statistically-interesting things to consider about the jackpot, though not really about improving your odds of winning it. "(You are vastly more likely to get struck by lightning twice in your lifetime.)" -- http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/powerball-jackpot-800-mi...
I didn't use the term "rando"and I agree it's not really fair. And I'm glad Forbes does have disclosures although I'm not sure how useful they are to casual readers to discern biases of one sort or another. All I can say is that, in the technology space, there are or at least have been writers who take a consistent point of view that happens to line up with various business relationships they have or have had. True, that point of view may be one they'd have anyway given that people tend to work with companies whose strategies and worldview they agree with.
As for your other points, they seem to boil down to "it's just the way the world is." I suppose that's true in many cases although I could certainly name quite a variety of pubs both online and offline, which have managed not to embrace the dark side of modern publishing quite so enthusiastically.
> I'm glad Forbes does have disclosures although I'm not sure how useful they are to casual readers to discern biases of one sort or another.
I agree with you that transparency is paramount. The FTC agrees with you and is regulating how this will work. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/nat... I am not a huge proponent of / believer in regulators like the FTC truly fixing the issue but do hope they'll help achieve the shared goal. People have to demand it and publishers / media orgs have to embrace it.
> boil down to "it's just the way the world is."
That's a fair encapsulation, though I'd add that it's the way the world has always been. For millennia, artists and story tellers have bemoaned the next generation -- "kids these days aren't being thoughtful or correct; they're being vulgar to appeal to the masses." This has been the case since before the Upanishads and Beowulf, since before jazz was called "the devil's music," since before anyone started selling newspapers or airtime on radio and TV. People deviating from the norm are frowned upon, then they become the norm and frown on the next generation. The progression occurs for artistic reasons -- "this is the way we think and communicate now" -- and commercial reasons -- "this headline sells."
> quite a variety of pubs both online and offline, which have managed not to embrace the dark side of modern publishing quite so enthusiastically.
This is also true. Publications like The Economist, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times have been incredibly wary of both the loss of editorial command and control that comes with allowing non-staff writers to regularly contribute stories and with selling advertorial products to advertisers. They are all getting into one or both areas to degrees.
Forbes, specifically, has been leading on both fronts and continues to push it. Those on the vanguard often have the most arrows sticking out of their chests. Some arrows are deserved; some are just from those in the norm bemoaning The Next Thing.
100% understood mine is not a popular position. The consensus from journalists and readers re advertorial is generally the same as yours. "Nobody wants them or has ever wanted them" is not a true statement: people buy and sell advertorials all the time. They are and have been a fact of the media business since there has been a media business.
There's no meaningful distinction between advertorial, product placement, sponsorships and the like in this context. E.T. eating Elliot’s Reese’s Pieces, J.Lo and Harry Connick Jr. drinking Pepsi on American Idol, Salvatore Ferragamo right under NYT’s front-page stories, WFAN's Boomer and Carton talking about their dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse were all bought and paid for by advertisers. This is how the business works and has worked. This is how your newspaper, magazine, TV show, radio program, web site, and movie are produced and brought to you.
For many people, advertising in general is crap. Done well, it can be good, informative, and entertaining. Most of us have ads we like. A lot of times, these stick out because they're exceptions. I've seen solid BBQ recipes and ERP project planning tips made possible by Reynolds and SAP. And I've seen plenty of shrill, shilly examples of paid content where I never made it beyond the first graf.
Crap ads, crap editorial, crap advertorial is about crap execution, it's not that those things are inherently crap. The people who execute them well will have success and will able to produce other work that success allows.
With regard to "poison the well," even outside of advertising -- in the "pure editorial" world -- there are always biases and points of view in play. Humans are impure. Watch a State of the Union, basketball game, or Counter-Strike tournament, and then read or watch coverage of the same from any two media outlets. There will be differences from what you observed and how they were reported. The well water is of a different quality than your understanding of it. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
With regard to "net negative," I build capabilities for people to tell stories and share them with people who care about those stories. I've gotten hundreds of creators published and paid by global publications by which they would not otherwise have been associated. I've helped these creators grow their communities, their body of work, their credentials, and their careers. They have hard data to consider this a net-positive, and I agree.
Give that their articles are everywhere when you go a google search, I'm sure they are making wheelbarrows full of money, even if the 'brand' suffers a bit. Print magazines written by professionals have been in decline for while now. User-generated content of mediocre quality is where it is now. That is the business model that makes the most money
Probably the best way to defeat ad blockers is to make the ads as unobtrusive and un-annoying possible. Facebook seems to have succeeded at this . Mobile adverting may also be more resistant to ad blocking.
An ad-blocker doesn't care how "unobtrusive" or "un-annoying" your ad is.
The sure-fire way to defeat an ad-blocker is to serve the ad from the same domain as the parent site. If they did that, ad-blockers would suddenly not work, and would have to become a lot more complicated to figure out which code is an ad and which is normal content. It's fairly easy these days because they outsource the ads to other domains, so the ad-blocker just has to block anything pointing to doubleclick.com and friends.
Ad blocking is a symptom of something else. Sure you can use same domain and make current ad blockers not work, but people will figure out better ways.
The reason why people install ad blockers in the first place is because they are becoming more and more aggressive. Toning them down is much smarter long term strategy, but it requires cooperation from everyone that is involved in advertisements.
People won't install ad block if they have no reason for it.
The whole thing reminds me of piracy, you can go add anti copying mechanisms, sitting down paying websites, start suing people or you start creating services like Netflix.
Ehh, noticed some typos made by Swype, but can't edit this post anymore, the last line should be:
"The whole thing reminds me of piracy, you can go add anti copying mechanisms, shutting down pirate websites, start suing people or you start creating services like Netflix."
Whenever I reinstall my computer, I spend ~10 minutes online before I think "Oh, yeah, I need adblock". Websites are vastly different before and after, and they remind me why I need it.
If everyone's ads were unintrusive, I'd never remember to install adblock
> There was a time when subscriptions formed a much greater proportion of journalistic income.
Actually, that is totally false. Historically, print advertising formed a far greater proportion of newspaper revenue than subscription revenue did.
In fact, only in the digital age (and the collapse of advertising revenue) has subscription revenue overtaken advertising for some publications. [0]
You're mythologizing an imagined past which never existed. Every kind of journalism, from The New Yorker to the NY Post, has consistently been heavily subsidized by advertising to survive, with advertising forming the bulk of revenue.
> or other income, like, say, Al Jazeera
Personally, I find advertising a much more palatable funding source than pollution from a dictatorship.
> There was a time when subscriptions formed a much greater proportion of journalistic income than they do now.
You're clearly intent on ignoring my argument, because otherwise you would actually check the citation which I offered. It directly refutes this point. Taking the NYT as an example, only in the last few years has subscription revenue formed a greater proportion of revenue than advertising.
> You seem intent on building up straw men and tearing them down. I'll let you do it in peace.
I think you're the one building a straw man. If you want to engage in an actual argument, offer some counter-citations.
> Pollution from a dictatorship? What?
Al Jazeera is only able to produce journalism without relying in advertising because the Qatari government funds it with oil money.
The limit is surreptitious product placement - the commercial corruption of the text. I run uBlock Origin myself, and agree that some kind of blocking is essential. But this seems an inevitable consequence - as product placement is being used in TV shows to counteract TIVO, etc.
Are they though? Last I'd heard, it was still a minority of people using ad-blockers. Techies, sure, but most people are clueless, and only use ad-blockers when their techie spouses/relatives install them.
Probably because corporate executives are asshole control freaks, so even if it's only 23% (according to the other responder using Forbes' own quote), they get pissed off and want to "fix" that. Also, nearly a quarter of viewers using ad-blockers still amounts to a lot of "lost" ad revenue, even if it's still a minority. (Using scare-quotes since you're not losing something if you never had it, but corporate executives don't believe that; just ask the MPAA and RIAA.)
The users with an easy to activate ad blocker recently bought a top of the market smartphone (or they have a relatively expensive subscription with a 'free' phone). That's a relatively small market segment, but the fraction of advertising revenues it brings in is quite a bit higher.
I highly down the ad-block penetration is low. However, it is growing, and sooner or later its going to become part and parcel of the browsing experience.
This reminds me of a time when a site asked me to enable JavaScript for "a better experience". I had been defaulting to JS off for a long time due to how effectively it stopped ads and other annoyances, and see these messages a lot, but this time I was momentarily curious for some reason; I did, only to be immediately assaulted with a bunch of ads, some crap following the pointer/scrolling, slide-overs, and other distracting annoyances that I would not at all call "a better experience". Fortunately I didn't get malware, but since then I've been much more cautious.
I know many are rather fond of sayings like "JS off will break most sites", but I challenge you to experience the web with it off by default and turn it on only for the few sites that absolutely need it; depending on what your most visited sites are, you may actually enjoy it. I find that the majority of sites are perfectly readable without JS.
On the other hand, I wonder if there are sites which use JS to hide the content and display a "turn off JavaScript to view this article", or "install adblocker to view this article"...
I've observed that suggesting that JS isn't needed for most pages is one of the more reliable ways to get downvoted on HN. This is usually acco9mpanied with a complaint that their "web apps" need JS, similar to the "JS off will break most sites" fallacy that you mentioned.
The people making those claims probably believe that everything would break without JS, because they are looking at it from the perspective of a business or designer. If you consider your own site to be "broken" if the analytics/tracking doesn't work, or the fad "UX" effects are not rendered, they it's easy to believe that JS should be mandatory.
This point of view is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the web is. HTML is more concerned with semantic abstractions than the specifics of how a page renders (use a pdf if you want to control the layout). This was an important design choice because it recognizes that the client is responsible for the rendering, which is free to completely ignore the suggestions made by the page.
Unfortunately, far too many people don't want to accept that they don't actually have control over the browser.
I have a less charitable view, when it comes to business. It's not about the misunderstanding of what the web is. It's about misalignment of values.
Most of website design today is not done with the interest of the user in mind, no matter what the popular UX posts will say. The companies only care about users insomuch as it leads them to closing a sale. Which means trying to give away as little value as possible for as much money as possible in return.
You can see it in contemporary design trends, and you can see it in the language used. Say, for example, "user engagement". Translated to plain English, it means making sure the user doesn't get what he came for too quickly. He'd then leave. You need to distract him with random stuff so that he stays "engaged" with your page.
Most of the JS on the web is either gratuitous or simply user-hostile. It hampers productivity, it destroys readability, and it does it on purpose.
And yeah, I'm fine with some of that; that's how dealing with businesses look like. I just wish people were honest about what they're doing. And then maybe little less user-hostile too.
I respect Do Not Track on my site. If you enable that the Mixpanel code will not be loaded. On the other hand, nearly all my network interactions are AJAX. I just tested it and you can't even login with NoScript running (because I hash your password client side before sending it). My site was actually pretty laughable without JS, I'll have to make something that warns people.
I'm a programmer though. When I wanted to build a site I threw in some basic HTML, grabbed a CSS framework, and then I wrote a ton of lines of JS. That's just how building webpages makes sense to me.
That can be an acceptable solution (or at least a workaround). It is always important to provide usable error messages when writing software. It is reasonable for some things to not work without JS.
That's the whole point behind progressive enhancement, which is really just defensive programming. You never assume things worked, for the same reason you should always be checking return values for errors. How you respond to an error is something the programmer has to decide because sometimes you can simply continue without some feature, while other times making sure the user sees an error message is important.
> This point of view is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the web is. HTML is more concerned with semantic abstractions than the specifics of how a page renders (use a pdf if you want to control the layout). This was an important design choice because it recognizes that the client is responsible for the rendering, which is free to completely ignore the suggestions made by the page.
You are describing the web as it was 25 years ago. No modern browser works this way.
That's the fundamental misunderstanding I was talking about. You don't know what browser is being used. Ever. You only know what the user agent decided to describe itself as and the requests it made to your servers. None of that tells you anything about what happened on the remote computer.
Besides, "modern browser" is a complete undefined term that is obviously subject to a lot of interpretation and opinion. Usually this term is used as either a euphemism for "I really want to put spyware on my website" or "I only use badly-designed tools".
I do the same. uBlock allows me to disable scripting which is good because pages load faster and become more static. However, if a random page is unreadable because Javascript isn't there I just click a button (another extension) to reopen the page in an incognito window where uBlock doesn't run, and I get that full-blown modern browser experience but with no private data offered by my browser.
For Chrome/Chromium, I currently have "Incognito This Tab".
(I used an extension called "Incognito This" first but one of its updates asked me the approve an array of extra unnecessary permissions which I obviously declined, then proceeded to uninstall the extension. The one I use now isn't quite as convenient but does the job.)
> On the other hand, I wonder if there are sites which use JS to hide the content and display a "turn off JavaScript to view this article", or "install adblocker to view this article"...
I've seen something roughly like this. If a site says "do something" in order to view content, like subscribe or bend over, I'll turn off CSS and sometimes see the content.
I've also noticed that in Firefox, going into "Reader View" will frequently turn a blank page into readable content (maybe because Reader View replaces the page's CSS with its own CSS).
I used Reader View for a short while, but I noticed that it sometimes obscures content that was viewable before enabling Reader. Turning of CSS has been the most effective and consistent experience for me. Reader just substitutes a simpler CSS for the original CSS.
The interface would be slightly different but there's no reason why an interactive map viewer couldn't be done in pure HTML and CSS without JS, and then JS added for more enhancements like AJAX loading.
Look at where the map images are coming from, copy the link, and play around with the URL parameters. Yes, this still works.
I also distinctly remember playing some HTML adventure games with similar pan/zoom/click interfaces before the millenium, and they didn't require JS either (nor took quite as long as the apps of today to load, on hardware that was probably an order of magnitude or more less powerful.)
Quite a few Javascript fanboys downvoting me but let me tell you the truth, users don't care about animated page transitions or whatever. Just want to read the article or buy the product or whatever. Javascript does nothing for them, never did, just developers with too much time on their hands is all.
Google Maps is a wrong example. It's a (basic) web application, i.e. what is generally an interactive program that happens to be rendered in the browser. It's obvious that most web applications need JS on, because they're literally made of JavaScript.
Web sites, however, don't need almost any JavaScript to work. 90% of it is either unnecessary design that distracts and confuses users, or actively user-hostile scripts (ad popups, trackers, interfaces designed to trick you into buying stuff, etc.).
- infinite scrolling (of course someone is going to say infinite scroll is a bad thing but it's clearly desirable to some)
- input validation (before I click submit I can know that eg my desired username isn't taken)
- others
All of these need Flash or JS. For such a technically inclined community I'm always amazed at how folks on Hacker News insist that the Web remain a circa 1990s document browsing system.
What's so surprising about it? That when I seek to learn information, I want to learn information in the most efficient way, instead of being slowed down by having to deal with all the artsy bullshit some designer put on the site? That, when learning, I don't like to be upsold shitty products and services I don't even need or care about? That when I seek to buy a product, I want a product that has a best price/value tradeoff for me and that I want to be done quick with it?
Ignoring your first two bullets, which pertain to web applications - something completely different than web pages - you've just about listed the proper uses for JavaScript. Most of the JS out there is at best gratuitous design, and at worst actively user-hostile crap. Just visit a few random pages you use and ask yourself, how many JavaScript-powered features are there to actually help you achieve your goal in an efficient manner? Probably close to zero.
Most websites are not designed with user's benefit in mind. They are designed to trick and exploit them. When 99.9% of the page size is hostile bullshit that only wastes electricity by spinning your CPU fan, you're really asking why so many people here ask for the pre-JS Internet back?
The "circa 1990s document browsing system" may have been poorer in visual features, but it was much better a system than what we have today.
This is rich, being reported by Engadget. I've reached out to them numerous times to let them know their ad networks try to redirect Chrome (Android) users to Play Store apps. It doesn't happen all the time, and it doesn't happen on desktop browsers. But it's frustrating and cheap.
Loading forbes.com and scrolling to the bottom of the page requires nearly 500 http requests. Anybody willing to share what it's like to work on a project like that? I assume that they employ skilled web developers who are aware of best practices, but aren't empowered to improve things?
> Anybody willing to share what it's like to work on a project like that?
I used to work at Business Insider and we definitely had similar problems. It basically boils down to marketing & advertising being more important to publishers than technology or user experience.
It's organizationally difficult to resist every marketer who wants to add "just one line of JavaScript" for their pet project. Then there's the fact that you're beholden to ad networks and can't do much more than whack-a-mole when they serve junky ads. Probably once a day we'd notice a bad ad and have to block it from being served.
At one point, we got management buy-in for me to work on performance issues. We managed to improve performance by ~90%, but the bulk of the project was just exhaustively listing every script on the page and axing those which didn't have a good justification. Amazingly, for a majority of the scripts, nobody even knew why there were there still (they were often added to please an old advertiser who wanted a specific measurement).
It's hard to place blame. Developers don't have the political clout to prevent the bloat and are often under-resourced as it is. Marketers want to gather metrics, but with the small development teams at most media companies it's easier to rely on third-party vendors over performant in-house solutions. Management recognizes the problems, but without marketing and advertising there's no business model.
Personally, I think ad networks are the ones who should be taking the lead here: they're big enough that they can afford to block bad advertisers without endangering their profitability. They should be investing much more in automated solutions to detect and block bad/heavy ads. Unfortunately, there's not really an economic incentive for them to do so: users blame publishers for slow pages, not networks. And ad blocking is much more detrimental to publishers than the networks.
Someone needs to give the marketing team a 'budget' just like how they have a financial budget they must stay within.
300ms average load time added by the marketing team, or 200kb JavaScript, or whatever. Split it all up however you like, and let them fight amongst themselves for what goes live on the site.
That won't work for the developers who lack the authority to make this a rule, but that's what you go to management with along with any of the various studies showing how important speed is to users.
I think ad networks are the ones who
should be taking the lead here
I don't understand why one ad network doesn't take this seriously and have strict rules and enforcement against "bad/heavy ads", and then use that fact to differentiate itself from competitors. The resulting conversion of sites to their network (perhaps with a certification of compliance badge that sites can display) would provide that economic incentive... and perhaps steer the broader market in that direction over time.
Wow, I thought you were being a bit hyperbolic but then I checked... even with uBlock and Ghostery enabled, their homepage is 331 requests for a total of 10.3MB.
I feel this makes forbes.com a fantastic website for calibrating how well the ghostery blocking is working. I have a whole bunch of new tracker networks blocked now.
It doesn't require 500 http requests if you run NoScript...
Of course, then for pages like that it usually doesn't show any text at all and you have to figure out manually which domain to enable for the stupid page to work. Best to avoid Forbes altogether if you can.
I have a feeling the "best practices" are actually part of the problem, since they tend to encourage replacing careful thought with "just apply this rule and it'll be all good" sort of dogmatism. When someone questions them about their decisions, their justification is basically "it's a best practice so it's the correct way to do it" and it gets quite a bit harder to have them change their ways. Over the years, I have worked with many developers (not web) like this.
"500 requests? So what? The site works for me. We're following best practices!"
Forbes comes in first place bar none if you compute (shadiness/brand visibility). They do all kinds of shady stuff like clickbait titles, shadiest of the shadiest ad formats, that meaningless interstitial ad, and probably whole lot more I'm not even aware of. Whenever I somehow land on one of their pages (I NEVER visit them voluntarily, it's mostly via some clickbait title I click without thinking), I always think "Just die off already if you can't figure out how to make money without alienating people who have believed in you. You're being a disgrace to what Forbes used to be and people who worked hard to build up that reputation"
In an "Ask HN:" someone is calling for a ban on Forbes.
Forbes has indeed reached a new plateau in stupidity.
Anyone using a text-only browser has seen that Forbes' most recent design transfers all the content but prevents the page from even displaying in even the most accomodating browser. The word that comes to my mind for their approach to web development is "boneheaded".
Quick and dirty script to view Forbes articles, with no ads:
Maybe people will ultimately resort to scrapers to get to the content. Scrape it into your favorite text viewer. Of course the layout will keep changing, so it will become a contest to keep updating the scraper scripts, with websites dedicated to keeping the latest scripts available. Or is that what Adblock does already?
Scraping is mostly useful if you're trying to get at some structured data or something. (Though you might be thinking of "readability" modes which work by assigning scores to what it thinks is content) For sites like these I figure that using noscript or a headless browser like w3m can suffice. My layperson understanding is that Adblock works at the network level by blocking requests to addresses on its blacklist.
Unfortunately, text browsers like Lynx and Links have been locked out of many sites. When I go to forbes.com using links, it lets me click on the "30 under 30" article, but then I get a mostly blank screen and can go no further.
Life on the web must be tough for the sight-impaired, as well. Too bad it's gone in this direction.
This is probably a consequence of relying on AJAX to load content, and not of using a text-based browser. If I visit Forbes in Firefox with noscript enabled, I also get a mostly blank screen.
Forbes is like a for-profit Wikipedia. Impossible to not see a Forbes result after when you do a google search. I think I saw a Forbes result when looking up some obscure string theory query. They are everywhere now. Like a kudzu. Their gateway pages are annoying, and I'm surprised they don't run afoul of Google's SEO guidelines.
Indeed: they serve Google different pages than ordinary visitors. When I set my user agent string to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
" suddenly forbes.com doesn't object to my adblocker anymore.
By default, I use comprehensive ad blockers on my client machines. I also suggest and assist installing them as well on anyone's machine without cost (normally billable).
A great deal of problems are solved full stop by doing that simple step. And it also sends the message of , "Not interested". I go to a website to read content, not to be swayed on what shit to buy immediately or later.
Oh, and punishment for allowing ads are "broken or slow machine clogged with malware". I'll pass.
This problem is present, to varying but nonzero degrees, in all of the advertising networks. And they're doing a miserable job of fighting it. I recently saw malware advertised through AdSense, and decided to try to report it. There was no mechanism for doing so, and I checked everywhere.
I used to be an avid Forbes reader but then came the ad insanity. One thing is for sure,
__I will not give up on my ad blocker__
even if it means not visiting and reading the sites whose content I enjoyed or even canceling my subscriptions. This is a free market, a new entrant will emerge for me in no time.
They're probably hoping it will blow over. They might wait for the Internet's focus to move onto the next scandal and then quietly put out a statement shifting the blame.
I won't be turning off my ad blocker, but why can't ad blockers disguise themselves?
Surely there's a way to trick their site into believing I have a normal adblock-free browser. Even a per-site whitelist kind of thing, whereby popular sites with adblock detection can be dealt with via addon scripts - say for uBlock.
JavaScript is Turing-complete. Ad blockers work by ensuring that some parts of the site are selectively not loaded or not executed. Ad blocker detectors can check whether some code was executed. Halting problem prevents ad blockers from being able to counter all such checks in the general case. So it's not even worth starting that arms race.
I think - if i didn't misunderstood it - the uBlock Origin author came up with something like a resource library for exactly that reason. Sadly I can't find a explainatory page on it right now; a possible resource file is located at:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/assets/ublock/...
You'd still have to execute the JS - how do you expect an adblocker to emulate an abusive tracker like http://cdn4.forter.com/script.js?sn=3326ea178bfb (bonus: check out the way it abuses fake sourcemaps to try and hide from devtools, and additionally log with identifying information via a network request if you are trying to debug their scripts)
Perhaps we're coming to an understanding that third-party advertising isn't such a great revenue model for the web because it requires users to abandon security. It's becoming increasingly clear that what we get for free by allowing these ads simply isn't worth giving up our security.
You might have meant this, but the problem isn't strictly third-party advertising, it's advertising delivered by a third party. Nothing wrong [1] with company a paying for company b to host an image and deliver it along with its content, just as offline advertising works.
Correct me if I am wrong but no advertiser pays for just showing ads on a website anymore.
They pay you for clicks.
If someone is blocking ads, they certainly are not going to click just because you ask them to allow them to be shown or find a way to force them being shown.
It's not entirely true, while CPC and CPA* ads have been getting more popular over time, CPM is still the best way to go for many other purposes.
Not everyone cares about getting people to click through to a landing page, lots of advertising is just about increasing the value of your brand, and if you want to reach as many people as possible you might not care whether they engage or not.
If you're not that familiar with how ad serving works today, watch this IAB video.[1] Note how the online auction process works. After information about the user (location, demographics, income level, previous purchases, what user has looked at) has been obtained from a data provider, that info is submitted to an ad exchange. Advertisers then have an opportunity to bid for placing an ad in that space, and have 10ms to bid.
But sometimes, no advertiser bids in that round. The ad space is now "remnant space" - ad space where all the big advertisers declined to buy. Remnant space is very cheap, maybe 5% of premium space. The first ad exchange goes out to a second lower-tier ad exchange, where the cycle repeats, at a lower price point. That's where junky ads and malware get inserted. Remnant-space sellers include Rubicon, PubMatic, and AdMeld (now owned by Google).
Many publishers are reluctant to set a minimum price and leave ad space unsold. Rather than fill unsold space with some non-ad content, or a house ad (Forbes running an ad for some other Forbes publication), they sell the space to one of those bottom-feeder services. This hurts their reputation and readership, and probably isn't worth the small revenue it generates.
Forbes covered the issue of ad exchange trust in 2014.[2] Their ad people need to read their own magazine.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Glgi9RRuJs [2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/12/10/can-you-tru...