Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mathel]

I sometimes wonder, do ads really work? As do they acrually boost sales? Is their effectiveness being measured? Or are advertising companies just selling their ad campaings to the advertised companies and they buy them because they're run by old out-of-touch executives? I suspect the only thing really being marketed are the ads themselves.

Sometimes, in some circumstances, and it is a risk.

You would have to see the ad when you don't need and aren't using the service it is offering. Later, when you seek it, you would remember the company name as association with said service, and seek them by name.

Of course, they have to not annoy you enough with said ad for you to not go to them on principle.

[Frumple]

Honestly the whole issue could be avoided if ads werent so intrusive and advertisers could be trusted not to shill out malware and trackers with their ads.

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it until some golden day where it actually catches on and becomes enforced law, but what should happen is there just be a hard size limit on ads, e.g. no more than 50 kb in size. So small a minor amount of text becomes a problem to fit in it, nevermind anything animated or with embedded sound or accompanying malware.

If the ads are by and large physically incapable of acting like malware, we can stop treating them like malware, basically. Until that happens they're going to be dealt with how they act, i.e. as a cyberattack.

[dragdeler]

Honestly the whole issue could be avoided if ads werent so intrusive and advertisers could be trusted not to shill out malware and trackers with their ads.

yt is my main hub of video entertainment throughout the day, and until may 2023 I just dealt with ads by having every new tab muted... looking back I feel silly for all the times I tabbed out to mute interruptions, but it was such a quick gesture it didn't feel like the accumulated time spent on it outweighed the hassle of finding better workarounds... now that I do have better workarounds nothing could make me tolerate again how I handled it before. They screwed that up for themselves real nice.

I didn't even do it on purpose but I sure gravitate towards channels who don't crank up ads to eleven, because there is a tiny bit of control there given to creators... Just considered the ads as some sort of indication that was entering into lowtier cashgrabbing trash and lived with that. Now I have skip 5 sec forward mapped globally on the keyboard so I'm not even tolerating creators reading from their sponsors anymore, not even during "heated gaming moments".

As I said they screwed up. I was basically having the patience of a saint before just because I was too lazy to set up 2-3 things quickly. Their ads can be longer right now than it would take you to download the whole video lol. If their stats can provethat they manage to send out more ads now, I sure pity the people who are watching that shit for us, the site used to be so good, and it held out for so long too compared to all the other services we used to swap through to stream shows illegally before netflix etc.

[McTraveller]

The entire original game of Elite fit in like 22kB. 50kB is plenty for malware.

[pisskop]

'

"heated gaming moments"

That term in itself is designed to pull people in.  Twitch calls things 'ad breaks', for instance - as if you were taking a break from whatever you were watching to see an ad.  The whole industry built around pulling people into a world where ads are part of the experience.

Where giving money is normal and routine, where your time is disrespected.  'Rounding up' at a store, having to look a barista in the eye while you select a tip for them, etc.

[Mathel]

I am pretty sure I can crash your computer with a 63B .bat file.

Spoiler: DO NOT RUN THIS (click to show/hide)

a.bat

Code: [Select]

@echo off
var x=%time%
var i
for /l %%i in (1, 0, 2) do (a.bat)


What this will do is allocate current time to a variable, then keep running more and more copies of itself. Each of which will do the same.

[dragdeler]

It is upsetting that you can't just read the clock once and be done with it for life .

[Frumple]

The entire original game of Elite fit in like 22kB. 50kB is plenty for malware.

It would tremendously cut down on how effective or sophisticated it is at a minimum, though. It'd nix most animation, just about every sound embed worth a damn, so on and so forth. Ads being limited to wireframe and text would a tremendous improvement

Regardless, just keep making it smaller until nothing untoward can reasonably be done with it. There'll likely be edge cases left over, but shit, if you can cut 99% of the horseshit out, you've cut out 99% of the horseshit. You take the dub at that point, heh.

[Egan_BW]

\
Of course, they have to not annoy you enough with said ad for you to not go to them on principle.

And yet, ads are continually optimized for annoyance. Whether animated on your web browser or a commercial acting as an obstacle to the content you actually want or superbowl ads being intentionally confusing and bizarre. There seems to be so much willingness to make something more annoying just for the sake of being mor noticeable.

[Loud Whispers]

I am pretty sure I can crash your computer with a 63B .bat file.

Spoiler: DO NOT RUN THIS (click to show/hide)

a.bat

Code: [Select]

@echo off
var x=%time%
var i
for /l %%i in (1, 0, 2) do (a.bat)


What this will do is allocate current time to a variable, then keep running more and more copies of itself. Each of which will do the same.

This does make me wonder how antivirus detects and stops certain viruses from just copying itself ad infinitum

[anewaname]

Videos that have good break points for ads are better than videos that do not. When you're still mentally digesting what was just said and an advert changes the tone, it is disruptive.

[lemon10]

I didn't even do it on purpose but I sure gravitate towards channels who don't crank up ads to eleven, because there is a tiny bit of control there given to creators... Just considered the ads as some sort of indication that was entering into lowtier cashgrabbing trash and lived with that. Now I have skip 5 sec forward mapped globally on the keyboard so I'm not even tolerating creators reading from their sponsors anymore, not even during "heated gaming moments".

Well good news, you don't have to do it manually.

[King Zultan]

I've found that if you reset the page several times it keeps the ads from loading and it'll go right to the video.

[Lord Shonus]

\
Of course, they have to not annoy you enough with said ad for you to not go to them on principle.

And yet, ads are continually optimized for annoyance. Whether animated on your web browser or a commercial acting as an obstacle to the content you actually want or superbowl ads being intentionally confusing and bizarre. There seems to be so much willingness to make something more annoying just for the sake of being mor noticeable.

There's been extensive research that suggests that annoyance doesn't hurt ads too much for most people. As long as it sticks in your head, you tend to have an association with that product, and any strong association has been shown to boost sales. That's where the expression "no such thing as bad publicity" came from.

[McTraveller]

The "science" of advertising is one into which I haven't looked... but it does seem kind of baffling.  Like, I presume the companies paying for advertisements have done the actual work of checking to see what the marginal return on ad-dollar-spent is, as opposed to, say, the marginal dollar price reduction, since from the standpoint of the seller they are identical to the bottom line:

That is, if I spend $1 in ads, I get $X more in total revenue.  If I drop prices $1, I get $Y in more total revenue.  The interesting thing is that to drop prices, I don't actually even need cash to do it, so it's arguably a more sustainable choice; in order to pay for ads, I actually need cash...

The brand recognition aspect is very interesting though, because it seems like it would be very difficult to tie sales at a future date to a particular ad campaign. Like if I pay $1 for ads today, how do I know the sales growth I have in 3 months is due to that ad, compared to any of another factors? Do companies buying ads actually track the data enough to make these determinations?

I think ads only really work in a few cases:
1) Announcing new products
2) Announcing availability of products
3) Appeals to emotion for truly discretionary purchases, where a product doesn't have a "taste" lock-in factor (e.g., if you prefer the taste of Coke vs Pepsi, no amount of advertising will change your taste buds).