I Pay for News; Why Do I Still See Intrusive Ads? (2017)
kirkville.com
kirkville.com
Why is it acceptable on the web?
Yes. And on a recent trip to India, it got even worse. SpiceJet (domestic airlines) has ads on the back of the headrest of EVERY SEAT.
Physical paper printed Ads!
So you are staring at it for the entirety of your trip. I kid you not.
You can skip the ads. Just scrub ahead.
Good thing you get to rate at the end of the trip, which would (hopefully) put a stop to that.
I know for a fact, this is all coming and has already started, and is going to get even more invasive.
It's not Orwell's imagination anymore, it's reality. Only privacy law can stop it, maybe.
Disappointing is that this is the more likely outcome, rather than easing the sensory overload, stress, and discomfort.
It’s an interesting balance but it always reminds me that flying through the sky in a tin can is not entirely natural.
Of course, some of the security measures are for your comfort and safety as well. It’s just where the line is between for your good and for theirs that is tough to identify.
Spirit actually sells ads on everything it seems, even on the exterior of the plane: https://skift.com/2014/03/11/spirit-airlines-brings-advertis...
They do, however, upsell you in person by making some hate-my-job contracted flight attendants go through the cabin no less than three times trying to sell various things to you.
There are some in the on board magazines I suppose, I don't read them though, why would I?
I assume this is an advert. There aren't any in business or first.
...and that's what I usually do when I fly --- sleep. I've found it to be the best way to make the time pass quickly.
Welcome to the world. Half the users of this site are actively perpetuating the corporate dystopia we inhabit.
Block their ads on the web ? you still have them on billboards if they’re local. They’ll mass DM whole regions if it makes economical sense. Your Netflix drama series will start mentionning them in passing. They’ll make ‘news’ pieces with a product CEO saving a baby chimpanzee that was not endangered in the first place.
You know they’ll find a way to your eyeballs by whatever mean, as long as it makes any sense to them.
I guess what you are responding to with outrage, I am responding to with a shrug.
It also matters if there is any actual competition that does tings better. Cable TV is having a bad time, in large part it is because of ads, but it is only happening because of the streaming services.
Airlines are a competitive service, but newspapers are not.
What's more annoying is adverts are a mere 7% of income, yet make it unwatchable.
So lucky in the UK.
I mean, advertising is about information sharing in a way. Can it be more efficient without clobbering art and media?
If I think about "information sharing", I'd imagine that the information is the thing of value to be shared and the goal is to enable the recipient to perform their own decisions with and increased base of background information.
However, ads work the other way around: You start with certainly outcomes that you would potential customers arrive at in their decisions and then think which information you can deliver to them to reach that outcome.
I know I'm way off in the weeds here, just brainstorming.
So maybe something like independently ran price comparison sites would work?
That's it. The ad just informed consumers about existence of a particular company and product, made it clear what the product is for, and listed its important qualities (especially differentiating from other similar products).
That's what you do when you actually care to inform, and not manipulate, customers. Since pretty much no ads are like this, I call bullshit when someone says advertising is important because it informs people.
Also I think Enzo Ferrari would argue that the F1 cars and team are the real Ferrari porduct. The road cars are just ads and merchandise for the race team. =P
TBF, the Ferrari IS the ad - for Ferrari and whatever aggregate-lifestyle-image you are promoting.
"Hey everyone, look at how I have succeeded to the point where I can drive car [X]"
Not that there is anything wrong with that, though.
For example - I like to wear the same hiker-couture gear everyday to feel comfortable, functional and good about myself appearance. I am an advertisement for my thinking and decision making capability.
It's acceptable because it's the only thing they offer.
One explanation I heard is that companies give them for free, so most people are happy to take them and don't bother with removing the ad.
After this point, customers don't have much reason to remove the plate or frame unless they really hate the ad, happen to be self-installing a rearview camera or are selling the car.
For free products online that have an ad model, it's the VC complex perpetuating that model heavily - where the money is available initially and to scale quickly (because it's an easy calculation). The mantra isn't just "Move fast and break things" but also seems to be "if I don't do it - someone else will get there first" as part of the desire to be first-to-market (by any means) as a means to reach/capture a few of the main defense mechanisms of economies of scale and network effects; you don't need defense mechanisms if you have a good product however, and have a reasonable cost structure - it sure will be more profitable in the short-term though, not sustainable however. Facebook, Cambridge Analytica et al, perhaps needed to happen to wake people up to understand the importance of accountability and of community, moderation, and such.
Why are you so certain that Ferrari doesn't remarket their buyers?
Not a Ferrari, but my mother got a discount on her Toyota Yaris by letting the car dealer put a decal ad on it for 1 or 2 years. (Back in 2002 or so.)
Eventually, you'll get sick, and die.
Prime example: Cable tv
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
If you wanted an ad-free subscription, it would cost substantially more than you currently pay to made up for the lost advertising revenue.
But people have proven they are mostly OK with ads, they don't mind them (since so many services online are fueled by them and people use them).
Let's remember that people generally have zero choice in the matter.
Well, that's what I mean. You often can't get the service without ads, as competitors show the same amount of ads.
Hell, these days you can't do anything, be it on-line or in meatspace, without being exposed to a steady stream of ads. There is no choice for ad-free life, unless you take the word "choice" so literally you accept moving to some remote location and living off land as a viable option for regular people.
Back in the 90s my dad used to buy shit from mail order catalogs. The volume and variety of catalogs he got in return was obscene. Seemingly every day he'd get a new catalog for something.
It is also quite disrespectful considering the tracking etc. that comes with it. How many more subscribers would they get if they didn't treat them as garbage?
Revenue = subscriber revenue + ad revenue from ads shown to subscribers + ad revenue from ads shown to non-subscribers
The suggestions was to eliminate the middle piece and increase the subscription price to make up for it in the first piece. That's still leaves the last piece.
The above article also states that digital advertising revenue only accounted for 37 percent of total advertising revenue. So that means digital advertising revenue is at most 12% of total revenue. Furthermore, it is unstated how much of digital advertising revenue comes from paid subscribers vs unpaid visitors.
If we assumed, for the sake of argument, that half of digital advertising revenue was from paid and half unpaid, then cutting ads for paid subscribers would be doable with only about a 10% increase in price.
What’s more likely is that the subscription price does in fact cover costs and that advertising revenue is seen as a nice benefit on top that can be grown creatively without any accountability or backlash.
There are a lot of counter examples to this. Hulu, Spotify, Ars Technica, YouTube Premium, etc... People are willing and able to pay for ad-free content.
The author thought he was doing exactly this and, consequently, will cease to be a paying subscriber for much longer.
The ads and difficulty in unsubscribing are the reasons why these organisations will never achieve a critical mass of paid subscriptions.
This is based on other posts in this thread that talk about a $84/year subscription and $4-$15/year ad revenue. Since that was a reference to Facebook revenue, I imagine it would be a decent upper bound.
It reminds me of how people say that it's impossible to provide fresh produce without paying people below minimum wage. In lieu of common sense, it depends on numbers, which don't need to be precise, but you can't just handwave.
I'm inclined to believe the true story is simply, as others state, that no matter what the ad revenue is, it's X% more and nobody wants to give it up if they don't have to.
The problem is that web ads are nothing like that. They are orders of magnitude more scummy, can’t be vetted in advance and stalk the shit out of you in order to serve you “better” ads next time, whatever the hell “better” means in advertiser’s perverted minds.
Digital-only subscription revenue in 2017: $340 million
Digital advertising revenue in 2017: $238 million
Obviously some digital advertising is shown to print subscribers logging in too... but if we ignore that for simplicity, without ads your NYT digital subscription would be 70% more expensive.
At $195/yr. for digital-only, it's already my most expensive subscription by a significant amount. If it were 70% more, or $331.50/yr, I imagine subscriptions would drop by a lot -- that's a lot of money for news.
So... that's presumably why there are still ads. Gotta pay the reporters somehow.
On the other hand, the New Yorker bugging you to subscribe is just lazy programming, and I hate it too.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...
Quarter 1 2018:
$414m total revenue
$260m subscription revenue (62% of total)
$154m non-subscription revenue (38% of total)
$46.7m digital advertising revenue (37% of total advertising revenue)
$126.2m total advertising revenue
If you cut digital advertising completely, not just for subscribers, you could make it up by increasing subscription price by around 10%, assuming 100% of subscribers would bear the new price.
The interesting statistic that we don't have is how much digital advertising revenue comes from paid vs unpaid readers.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/business/media/new-york-t...
So a yearly print subscription would go from $422.50 to $500 here in New York.
I'm not sure print subscribers would want to subsidize digital readers like that, especially when their own print edition is already chock-full of ads.
Is this from advertising to paid subscribers only, or to paid and free both? If it is the latter, your math may be off by orders of magnitude.
Sure there are viral articles that get bigger traction, and it's a "soft" paywall when coming from social media or search, but they're been significantly increasing restrictions on the soft paywall over the past year to impose both daily and monthly limits.
Edit: typo
And so would they criticize companies that put a lot of cash on them ? Perhaps. May be not.
In France, we have a news website [0] which is totally independent, and only accessible for paying subscribers. It took them a few years and now they are earning money.
You might or might not agree with their editorial line, but the fact is that they can investigate any company without hesitation.
It’s hard, but I think it’s the only way to have an independent information.
Now I pay for cable TV and it's jammed full of commercials.
The idea that free online services aren't really free because we pay with our attention and with our data is only half true.
Paid online services also take our data and increasingly interrupt us with advertisements, just like cable TV.
I guess were not saturated quite yet...
The same subscription with out adverts would be £35 a month, basically the same price.
Because you haven't installed an ad blocker yet. Get uBlock Origin, enable all the filters and don't look back.
If not showing ads wasn't part of the deal, ads will be shown. If not harvesting your personal data wasn't part of the deal, personal data will be harvested.
That you paid money is irrelevant.
Paper newspapers always had ads too. Subscribers didn't get a different version of the paper without the ads. Ads have been a deeply ingrained part of the news business for over 100 years and they aren't going to stop now.
Remember, something stops Ferrari from blanketing the dash with ads. Why doesn't that same dynamic apply here?
In my opinion the best thing to do with them in response is banish them. Don't invest in them or patronize them as much as possible as they are clearly out to screw you over. If you are in management of a position to do so oust them as soon as possible. Sadly they are a goddamn plague and hard to oust.
Wait until the author learns about clearing cookies.
Eg. https://twitter.com/arstechnica/status/1051475468199833600
>Meh. All-in-all, the Lexus NX 300h is an uninspiring car. If you like hybrids and want to drive one with a luxury badge, the NX 300h is worth looking at. I would have liked the option to suck the battery dry before the internal combustion engine kicks in (à la the plug-in Chrysler Pacifica hybrid). Instead, EV Mode in the NX 300h is limited to low speeds.
Sgt_Apone beat me to it.