[jes5199]

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

but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try

we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

[browningstreet]

I had a site with some traffic and a popular, class-leading ad plugin for the platform.

At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription.

I got an email from the developer, which was kind enough, asking me why I was cancelling and if there was any feedback I wanted to share.

I mentioned how complicated ad inventory, ad placement, and online ordering for hands-off customer self-service was.

His question back was, "What's hard about it?"

I couldn't even muster a reply.

[VertanaNinjai]

Maybe there are some details missing here, but asking for more detailed or tailored feedback makes it seem like he cares and was willing to hear you out. Sometimes people are in their own industry for so long that they forget what their industry and tools look like to outside eyes. A simple menu to him could’ve been overwhelming for you as a quick example.

[pseudohadamard]

I ran into this a while back at a talk when the speaker used the phrase "perfectly ordinary sodium iodide gamma ray spectrometer". I pointed out to him afterwards that that's not something that most people would expect to follow "perfectly ordinary" in a sentence, and he explained that, yes, today you'd be using thallium-doped CsI or NaI scintillators instead.

[inopinatus]

Unsurprisingly, there's a representative XKCD. https://xkcd.com/2501/

[kgwxd]

If the response is an exact quote, the tone is "you must be stupid." It doesn't convey caring and wiling to hear things, and if they can't understand that before sending it, it makes perfect sense that the product sucks, and it will only get worse.

[47282847]

It’s not the tone. It’s how you perceive the tone to be. Be careful, especially in a culturally diverse and international environment. Plenty of cultures cringe when they receive overly friendly phrased words, as it will not sound honest and curious to them but condescending and fake (in this context it may be perceived as sarcasm); whereas others will experience and mean it as straightforward openness.

Communication is hard. Even harder in writing. A usually working approach is to assume friendliness.

[rcakebread]

Why didn't you tell him what you told us?

"At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription."

[nedt]

Also the companies selling the ad platforms aren’t knowing their own technical documentation. They tell everyone you need to load JS as heavy and blocking as possible and collect as much user data as possible because they can’t read their damn documentation. That’s also why news pages always say ad only works with massive tracking, which isn’t true and not even that effective.

[superjared]

> we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop

this is batshit insane, yet I believe it

[likium]

"Parable of the broken window", except instead of preventing the kid from throwing the rocks, they hired a someone to catch the rocks midair.

[WorldPeas]

though in this case it seems "the rocks were coming from inside the building"

[c0balt]

Somewhere in the net of tubes of our AC we have a machine that produces rocks. They randomly shoot of the air vents, please install ballistic shields in front of the vents to stop them from hitting our customers.

[monkpit]

The pelxiglas is cheaper than taking the system down…

[bartread]

Which sounds insane until you realise that you’ve just described in outline something very like the iron dome missile defence system, which actually exists in reality.

(And of course you’ll get no argument from me that it’s insane that such things need to exist at all, but such is the world we live in.)

[evilduck]

I'll bolster it. I've worked on a site-you-have-heard-of. They were struggling and as a response they would change marketing leadership basically every year to try to find a new way to reach a new or different demographic. Every year the new marketing leader would say "we're not doing any of that previous idiot's strategy, as I am the one who knows best". And as each marketer tried to make their mark, 50 new Google Tag Manager script injects would appear.

Now, whose job was it to remove the previous 200 Tag Manager scripts? Obviously the last guy's, because those were his experiments and he was in charge at the time so new guy was clearly not responsible for it. And at the end of the year, 250 Tag Manager injections would now exist and we would turn the page to reveal a new CMO.

And thus ends the parable of how I put a wrapping feature flag on the code that added Google Tag Manager to the site so that I could display the effects of the insanity and demonstrate why the PageSpeed metrics were ass and why engineering couldn't fix it (in a way they would permit, anyways).

[kittikitti]

Thank you for this insight. Even as a developer, I can easily lose track of all the trackers I've included in a webpage. Usually, if I see a tracker in the code, it's already obfuscated and I provide the benefit of the doubt to leave it in.

It's only when I jump back into the ads management page where I'm able to get a better idea. Even then, the specific trackers are hidden behind a variety of menu items that can change every time. This post made me realize that I need a better strategy as things are getting ridiculous with ads.

I used to be someone who didn't use ad blockers because some of them are botnets. It's just not the same anymore, as I would trust the botnets with my data over the advertisers.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

Even if its obfuscated, there should be a comment above it saying what it is. This is bad developer hygiene.

[Aurornis]

> the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try

I think this might be selection bias in your customer base. I've had some friends who worked at a local news outlet. The ads on their website were a big deal and they had a full-time position dedicated to managing internet advertising.

[jes5199]

yes perhaps only the big players have this problem

[Aurornis]

Other way around. Only the very small players have this problem.

For big players, ad revenue is a big part of their business. Not a forgotten corner of their website.

[archon810]

Was your company called Scroll by chance, the one that Twitter acquired?

When I ran Android Police, we were one of the largest Scroll users in the beginning and I was pretty upset when Scroll shut down.

However, it never amounted to any meaningful revenue and was just a nice way to implement ad-free subscriptions across various sites. Other big sites used it too, like The Verge and Gizmodo and I thought it had some potential.

[abrookewood]

That is just plain ridiculous. How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?

[bandrami]

Oh Lord you need to take on some non-tech companies as clients if this surprises you. I've had clients who forgot they had a website and thought that monthly hosting bill was just for something to do with the back-office Internet connection.

[abrookewood]

That is insane.

[bandrami]

It was a janitorial temp company and they didn't really care about computers. Whoever had been their IT guy before me had made a pretty neat website that would let clients book cleaning staff and give them a birds-eye- view of upcoming staffing needs. It was marginally better than their existing phone and email based system but not enough to make them change it, and over years of saying "let's try it next quarter" eventually everybody forgot about it.

[deathanatos]

> That is just plain ridiculous.

This is called "Tuesday", for me.

> How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?

The knowledge atrophied. To me the harder problem is keeping knowledge off the bus… it gets on of its own accord and then boom: knowledge lost. People leave the company, and with them, lessons. People are in constant crunch time, and don't have time for the last 2% of the work that takes 98% of the time, like adequately documenting the weird bits of the system. Half the time the corp site is an afterthought to main engineering, relegated to some CMS that marketing can have, and trust me marketing is not writing docs.

Company leadership at nigh every job I have worked on encourages the company, collectively, to forget. Dev turnovers at most places I've worked average around 2y… that's knowledge, just walking out the door.

[Eric_WVGG]

hi, I'm a dev who was working in journalism around thirty years ago and still has some connections.

The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.

The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.

So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().

They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.

(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)

[ratatougi]

Can you suggest some websites used to read RSS?

[robin_reala]

Feedly is the obvious choice I guess: https://feedly.com/news-reader

[Eric_WVGG]

I use the Reeder app on iPad. NetNewsWire and Feedbin are good alternatives. I’ve never had a particularly good experience on web apps.

[btbuildem]

If I may, what was your vision? What were you aiming to replace the ads with?

[MyHonestOpinon]

I have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.

[latexr]

Isn’t that Apple News+? Cheaper than $20, too.

Alternatively, Libby is free (and yes, legal, though not available everywhere).

[mikestew]

Isn’t that Apple News+?

You would be correct, but...and I say this as a subscriber to Apple's "all-in-one" package...Apple News+ is in many ways garbage. Low-rent articles from publications whose time has long passed (looking at you, Popular Mechanics), with Taboola-grade ads interspersed (as Gruber said recently, how many 30-something blonde women need hearing aids?).

That said, stay away from the front page and go straight to your selected publications, and it's a good deal with access to WSJ, LA Times, and what have you. You still get crappy ads (which I can't seem to find a way to block with PiHole), but the content is there. For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it.

[Aurornis]

> You would be correct, but...

I agree that Apple News+ is bad, but I think this is an example of why these plans always fail:

Someone says "I would pay good money for a service that does..." and then the service that does the thing appears and the goalposts keep moving as people realize their threshold for wanting to pay for something is higher than they originally thought.

[svachalek]

Popular Mechanics is so sad these days. Like the Discovery Channel, they just had to take something that was good and intentionally turn it into garbage for some coin.

[Spooky23]

Apple News is a weird interface it it’s great. Magazines are all garbage now with few exceptions. In my case my local paper is there as well.

I would subscribe to the paper directly, but after the 19 week trial, it renews for random intervals for increasing prices.

[chipotle_coyote]

"For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it" has been my take since I got it sometime last year. It's kind of remarkable -- the ads are absolute trash and the apps, while not bad, are a little weird in hard-to-define ways other than "Apple used to do better at this whole UI thing". But if you want just a handful of the paywalled publications it unlocks for you, it's a great deal.

[markdown]

> "For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it"

Enshittificators love people like us.

[girvo]

I pay for Apple One and yet the apple news app on my phone is still riddled with ads with weird AI generated people and horrible articles from crappy publishers pushing some other sensationalist garbage.

[BizarroLand]

I would gladly pay an extra $20/m for a Disney style internet fast pass where I can browse any site that is subscribed to the service without ads, cookie preferences already set, no login or login managed by the extension for the fast pass service, and maybe a search provider that allows me to filter out SSO spam sites and adwhores like Meta and Google, and where some significant portion of my monthly pay is sent to the participating sites I browse.

My only overriding and most prominent concern is that given how every other webservice has been, that once they have sufficient ownership of the space they will increase the cost, likely significantly, and then they will likely add in their own ads on top of everything else.

It will take a literal once in a century genius to make something like this that actually works and that companies will latch onto.

[mapt]

There are enormous piles of money looming around every corner seeking a return on investment. If you have users that are enjoying a service, one of those piles of money can buy out the owner, double the price, implement ads, and sell all the private data. The bet they are making is it will take longer for the userbase to quit than it will take to make back their investment.

Every popular / beloved service is a target for these giant piles of cash. The fact that lots of people like it is de facto proof that it's underpriced, or over-resourced, or coddles its users with too much content. According to the finance industry, a stable business relationship should have the userbase reluctantly concluding that they have no other option, gritting their teeth and opening their wallet - and that's the sort of maximally profitable entity that a giant pile of cash will leave alone, letting it just exist, as a business.

[porkloin]

I think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top.

I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.

[BizarroLand]

Good catch. I didn't even think about the fast lanes fiasco. I don't know why businesses have decided that since they have connected to the internet that the internet owes them.

It should be a public utility. It should be as ad free as reasonable. It should not track you.

The internet should be a lot of things that it currently isn't all because rent-seeking money and power grubbing bastards have too many of the strings and love pulling them like they're pulling their puds.

[bandrami]

I swear by Kagi and will never go back (until they inevitably start including ads after a bad earnings report)

[card_zero]

Then there's the TV streaming problem where the three shows (or sites) you're interested in viewing regularly belong to three different subscription services, and they're jealously set against uniting. I guess that's like the same problem as individual paywalled sites, but bigger.

[didgetmaster]

Everyone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.

[autoexec]

I think that cable represents a lot of failures that don't need to repeated. If someone were serious about starting an ad-free subscription service there are things they can do to help ensure it stays ad-free. An easy one would be contract provisions that would require the company to make massive payouts to customers if ads are ever introduced to the service. That kind of provision doesn't cost an ad-free company anything to include, but when somebody gets greedy and starts considering adding ads it would make the idea much less attractive and could force them to look at other ways to enshitify their product.

[Terr_]

> contract provisions that would require the company to

IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.

If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.

If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.

[bluGill]

cable didn't start ad free. It started because some valley communities couldn't get a signal at all so the put one community antenna on high ground and ran a cable to houses to get normal broadcast tv with ads to each house. a few ad free stations came latter.

[Kye]

I spent a long time thinking CATV on the back mean Cable TV, not Community Antenna TV.

[manarth]

Huh, and I thought it was short for "Conditional Access TV" – i.e. you needed a subscription of some sort.

TIL.

[topaz0]

Others mention Apple news+ but there are actually a bunch of services that do this. Zinio is one that I've encountered, but a quick search shows that there are also Magzter, Readly, Flipboard, etc etc. I can't speak to their relative merits/range of content/user hostility. In the early 2010s I used to use one where you bought credits and paid per article (usually on the order of $1-$2 iirc, but depended on the source/length). Can't remember what it was called and I don't see it on any of these lists, so maybe it no longer exists or was bought up.

Anyway, this is something you can have if you actually want it.

[hkt]

Press reader is basically this, although it lacks some of the better titles.

[saltyoldman]

What frustrates me to no end, is that Youtube makes about $2 per user per month from ads. Yet if i want to go ad free, they expect me to pay $14 per month.

Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NOT. It's a fucking scam to make us pay a premium.

I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...

[simonw]

My guess is that the $2/user/month thing is an average across all of the users, and the fact that you use YouTube enough to even consider to pay to go ad free puts you in the much higher range of dollars-per-month users such that $14/month may even lose them money.

[smcin]

Yes it's a very broad global average. Advertisers pay much more for North American users, then European users.

[tonyedgecombe]

And the ones they want to reach the most are the same ones willing to pay for a subscription to remove ads.

[jrmg]

FWIW, YouTube Premium Lite is $8/month. It removes ads from most content, just not music, and doesn’t include YouTube Music. For me it’s well worth it.

[neutronicus]

Presumably because advertisers won't continue to pay $2/user/month for a pool of users that has been denuded of all the users with three bucks a month to rub together for ad-free YouTube.

[harikb]

Unless you have some first hand information that I have, you are more than 10x off.

> I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...

There in lies the problem. Your eye balls (assuming well employed with $$$ disposable income) is another 10x worth to advertisers.

If I were to make a guess, Youtube for sure will lose money at $14/month on your specific browser.

You are literally subsidizing internet for, let us say for arguments sake, some zip code in rural america or <sub any rural part of the world> 's Youtube streaming needs.

[jetpks]

At least in my case, I had Youtube Red and would watch a few hours of content per day. Then I canceled and found the ads so unreasonable that I just stopped using youtube altogether. Now they make no money from me.

[Gunax]

There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website.

Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).

The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.

----- The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.

By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.

I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.

[saltyoldman]

I think that's the angle I'm going for. If Youtube was $25 per year or even $50 per year, it would be a no-brainer for me to pay that. Even if 50 does NOT outbid the advertiser, wouldn't YT rather have guaranteed income rather than trying to constantly find high bidders.

Youtube claims "we’ve reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials"

And I bet most of that is trials and it's probably cumulative rather than right now. I bet that 500m people paying $50 /year would actually make them real money that is dependable - since most people would pay for it again next year to avoid ads. And the lower price would skyrocket subscriptions.

[umanwizard]

What if they dropped the average price of YouTube Premium to $2? And charged you $20 but people in Africa $1. Then it’d be more comparable to ad revenue. Would you be happier then?

[deanishe]

What if?

That's exactly what they do. It's 80c/month in Argentina.

[umanwizard]

Indeed, so what’s OP complaining about?

[WorldPeas]

...And you'll find that when you do so magically you seem to get logged out more frequently, and because of their UI, you likely won't notice until the sneaking suspicion the quality of your recommendations has dropped catches up with you

[b112]

I'd love that, but then I see things like this:

https://www.justwatch.com/

Which is a great idea and a great site, but why is it even necessary. The sheer dumb that means there are 12312 Netflix 'class' stream services is beyond ridiculous. I used to love one-stop shopping, now it's so fragmented I just went back to piracy. I don't have time to monkey with 10 sub services.

My point? As soon as such a service existed, there'd actually be 50 of them, and the stuff you wanted would be on 8 separate services.

[jes5199]

it was a single monthly subscription to a bundle, and the clever part is we would measure time spent on each site and divide up the money proportionally, so the site you spent the most time reading would get paid the most. Our founder had the idea that this would incentivize higher-quality content. We never got enough paying subscribers to really pull it off

[btbuildem]

Interesting approach! I feel like this is a hard space to break into, because of the friction -- both having to convince content hosts to opt in, and consumers to subscribe.

[giovannibonetti]

Micro-payments, probably

[pinkmuffinere]

This is fascinating! Can you share more stories?

[_doctor_love]

Not OP, but I’ll throw out that many large commercial websites don’t directly integrate ads themselves. Instead, they use a tag manager.

Often, that tag manager isn’t managed by the technology department, and well-meaning marketing people continue to sign contracts and jam JavaScript into the front end. If there’s also not a good content security policy in place, ad networks quickly become unregulated, all sorts of strange ads come in, and it’s very difficult to control them.

There are a lot of “MarTech” consultants out there that help clients essentially burn their tag manager to the ground, then build it from the ground up to work properly.

[jes5199]

one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost?

and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined

but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads

[pinkmuffinere]

That is a really interesting idea! I immediately see some problems, and you probably already thought through these while working on it, but I'm curious to hear if there were good solutions, or if they were non-issues for some reason:

- If it's a niche product, you can just "buy out" the ad space on the website. But if the phone becomes popular enough that the majority of a website's ad revenue comes through this route, there starts to be a bit of an extortion-like opportunity for the website owners. The website has an incentive to show _even more annoying ads_, with the knowledge that most users actually won't see the ads, but they'll still get paid as if they did. They can say "oh, we're adding 5 more banners, so you'll need to pay us 5x the amount you used to"

- I also see problems from the other direction (from the companies purchasing the ad space). By paying a website _not_ to show ads, you're essentially buying ad space. But the other purchasers-of-ad-space will still exist, and will now be competing for a more limited amount of space. So prices should rise, as demand rises. And as prices rise, you'll have to pay the websites more to keep them ad free. This should converge to a new equilibrium eventually, but I wonder if you accounted for that? If you get significant market share, the new equilibrium would be really expensive, because you're essentially trying to out-purchase everyone.

[snthpy]

Lol