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Businesses Advertising The Internet

Is Online Advertising Worthless? (zerohedge.com) 289

turkeydance shares a story from ZeroHedge: Category 1 storm clouds are gathering over what has traditionally been one of the most lucrative, and perhaps only profitable, sectors to come out of Silicon Valley in decades: online advertising. Two months ago, it was P&G which fired the first shot across the "adtech" bow when not long after it announced it was slashing its digital ad spending because it thought it was not getting the kind of return on investment it desired, it made a striking discovery: "We didn't see a reduction in the growth rate." CFO Jon Moeller said "What that tells me is that that spending that we cut was largely ineffective"...

So fast forward to last week, when during Thursday's Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, Restoration Hardware delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company's online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general... What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following: "we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?"

Stated simply, the vast, vast majority of online ad spending is wasted, chasing clicks that simply are not there....One wonders how long before all retailers - most of whom are notoriously strapped for revenues and profits courtesy of Amazon - and other "power users" of online advertising, do a similar back of the envelope analysis, and find that they, like RH, are getting a bang for only 2% of their buck?

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Is Online Advertising Worthless?

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  • Shitty Consultants (Score:5, Insightful)

    by corychristison ( 951993 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:16PM (#55212103)

    Clearly they are spending their advertising budgets with the wrong consultants.

    Anyone decently competent at online marketing knows how to narrow their most effective keywords, and push them harder, to achieve better click-through rates.

    • by slazzy ( 864185 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:55PM (#55212283) Homepage Journal
      Correct, you should know to the penny, to the minute how effectice your online ads are.
      • by lucm ( 889690 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @09:26PM (#55212353)

        Correct, you should know to the penny, to the minute how effectice your online ads are.

        You mean that you should get from Google metrics about how effective are the ads Google is selling you, or that you should get from Facebook metrics about how effective are the ads Facebook is selling you, without in either case having access to the information needed to verify the metrics they give you?

        That's the world of online ads, in a nutshell.

        • by slazzy ( 864185 )
          Not if you value your money. You should analyze it yourself. The most important metrics being dollars out, vs dollars in. Even if you business is based on long term sales conversion, you can save cookie, or the user id if they create an account to monitor the value of a customer from your ad campaign. Advertising based on brand building is probably a waste.
          • by lucm ( 889690 )

            Not if you value your money. You should analyze it yourself. The most important metrics being dollars out, vs dollars in.

            "Dollars in, dollars out" doesn't tell you you which ads are more cost-effective, unless you only pay for CPC ads, have a very limited number of ads, and have no other source of revenue

            • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday September 17, 2017 @12:58AM (#55212793)

              "Dollars in, dollars out" doesn't tell you you which ads are more cost-effective

              You have a specific landing page for each ad. Then you track that contact through to the purchase, whether that is online, or through an offline sales lead. You know how much the ad cost, and you know the revenue generated. You subtract out your COGS, and if the result is positive, your ad is making money.

              This is advertising 101. If they don't even know how to do ads right, then P&G is run by morons.

      • by SNRatio ( 4430571 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @10:12PM (#55212463)

        Correct, you should know to the penny, to the minute how effectice your online ads are.

        Horseshit. Most sales cannot be directly connected to a click any more than viewing a commercial on TV can. Most of the time you don't know if the person who clicked is the person who bought your toothpaste or furniture. Clickthrough is not a measure of an ad's effectiveness, it's just a proxy.

        • by elrous0 ( 869638 )

          A click-through doesn't do you any good unless you can give the person doing the clicking a reason to actually buy what you're selling.

        • by tomhath ( 637240 )

          Most sales cannot be directly connected to a click any more than viewing a commercial on TV can.

          Of course not, that's not how it works. Marketing operates at the macro level
          1) look at your sales this month,
          2) run an ad campaign,
          3) compare the cost of the advertising to the increase in sales.

          You have a very good idea how effective the campaign was. Whether any given click generated a sale is irrelevant.

          • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            Even that does not work because a company like P&G has a pipe line. WallMart for example on of your re-sellers, has X units on hand all ready. You run an ad, Wallmart's sales change immediately yours do not.

            A very metrics driven company like Wallmart probably responds pretty quickly by adjusting their re-order count so you get that data right away. Now how about Hussey's General Store in some rural mountain town in eastern Virginia? They sell more P&G product this month and little less of the c

            • by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Sunday September 17, 2017 @07:53AM (#55213597) Homepage Journal

              It also does not capture brand building.
              Jewellers, for example, advertise throughout the year, with less expectation of sales next month than people remembering the brand name come holiday season or anniversaries. Similar for plumbers and funeral homes with local ads.
              The goal is being the first company you think of when you one day will use such services.

    • by sittingnut ( 88521 ) <sittingnut@gma i l . com> on Saturday September 16, 2017 @09:05PM (#55212305) Homepage

      P&G, that lives on selling stuff, have "wrong/shitty" marketing consultants?
      i doubt that. they know what they are talking about when they say something is "largely ineffective".
      -
      btw i for one have not clicked on an online ad for over a year, and last time was deliberate click to check the ad mechanics(and why it was not blocked by ad block) rather than because of interest in product.

      • Right. Even if I see an advertisement for a product I like, I will never click on the ad itself. That's just dumb and a way to get malware and tracking.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        P&G, that lives on selling stuff, have "wrong/shitty" marketing consultants?
        i doubt that. they know what they are talking about when they say something is "largely ineffective"..

        Proctor and Gamble have finally discovered what any sane person has known for a long time. The Online Advertising Emperor is not wearing any clothes.

        99% of ads are garbage that nobody would ever click on except by accident, which means that the way that everyone gets paid -- counting clicks -- is completely meaningless because click fraud is so rampant. Plus ads have become so intrusive and loaded with malware that more and more people are blocking them.

      • If you take into account the number of people who accidentally click on ads, the click bots, and the fact when you search for "example company" on Google, Google will show an ad leading to the company's official site just above the organic search result leading to the official site (some people click on the ad out of laziness because it's on top, I have done it in the past), plus people who use ad blockers, there aren't many useful clicks left. I am surprised this business model still works and hasn't gone
    • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16, 2017 @10:01PM (#55212439)

      Advertisers are paying for ads that are viewed and clicked on by bots, not humans; and ads are placed by thousands of automated “ad exchanges” that are out of control of the advertiser, and on sites and pages that don’t match the advertiser’s products.

      Over the past 5 years, spending on online adverting has more than doubled but retail spending by consumers has only increased by an average of 2.4% per year. Digital advertising – despite the lure of Facebook and the like – cannot induce consumers to spend more and increase the size of the overall pie for advertisers. It can only, at best, divide up the pie differently.

      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        retail spending by consumers has only increased by an average of 2.4% per year.

        In other words pretty close to the inflation rate. We might conclude from that consumer behavior really has not changed much at all at the macro level. One interesting question would be has online advertising impact the classes and types of products the retail dollars are chasing.

    • by Karlt1 ( 231423 )

      That type of precise measurement only exists with direct response advertisement as opposed to brand marketing.

    • What they found is that the most effective keywords were people who google their company already, and click on the ad, because it looks like the first result, expecting it to be a link to the company. So, they could just not pay Google to, you know, act as a search engine to themselves.

  • Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:18PM (#55212121)

    Yes. Please kill it.

    • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      The majority of the ads put in are useless. They are for stuff people already know about. I already know Toyota exists - I can see their cars everywhere. If a new car brand was introduced in your market, like Acura or Scion on Euro (which are basically domestic US re-branded stuff) then you'd need quite a campaign to make people dare buying that new brand.

      If Toyota has a ground-breaking new tech that can be proven to change the life of people then it might be worth to throw in an ad for Toyota. Otherwise th

  • by jetkust ( 596906 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:21PM (#55212139)
    When you search for a company or website on google there is an advertisement for it right above the search result taking you directly to the web site you were looking for. I always click on the search result because clicking on an ad is just weird to me, even though they both likely take me to the same spot. But what is the point of buying an ad like this if they are already trying to get to your site in the first place? Why convince someone to do something they are already doing? Are they afraid another company is going to buy the search ad and someone is going to randomly click on another website instead of the one they were specifically looking for?
    • by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:24PM (#55212159) Homepage Journal

      I don't click on the ad in the case you describe above, because I simply don't trust the ad to be what it appears.

    • by thomst ( 1640045 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @09:56PM (#55212427) Homepage

      jetkust wondered:

      When you search for a company or website on google there is an advertisement for it right above the search result taking you directly to the web site you were looking for. I always click on the search result because clicking on an ad is just weird to me, even though they both likely take me to the same spot. But what is the point of buying an ad like this if they are already trying to get to your site in the first place? Why convince someone to do something they are already doing? Are they afraid another company is going to buy the search ad and someone is going to randomly click on another website instead of the one they were specifically looking for?

      The link in the ad does not take you "directly" to the website for which you were searching. Instead, it takes you there by a roundabout route. Here's the URL for the ad that the search string "procter and gamble" generates:

      https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwing5erkavWAhUCl34KHRC6B2kYABAAGgJwYw&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAESEeD2JLJzL1dBgUZFbmBGP-fz&sig=AOD64_3I39rwK0_DYxkNqTS1PJcvi8-iYg&q=&ved=0ahUKEwi42ZGrkavWAhVoxlQKHWkNCfwQ0QwIJQ&adurl=

      Note that the url in question begins with "https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk". That's a call to googleadservices.com, which is google's central advertising hub, alerting it that a pagead has been clicked.

      The next bit is "&ai=DChcSEwing5erkavWAhUCl34KHRC6B2kYABAAGgJwYw&ohost=www.google.com", which tells googleadservices to employ the script at "ai=DChcSEwing5erkavWAhUCl34KHRC6B2kYABAAGgJwYw", and that the request is originating from google.com. The "ai=" part might mean "advertising insight", or "artificial intelligence", or even "acknowledge immediately". I dunno - you'd have to ask one of google's advertising engine programmers (and they a are notoriously closed-mouth crew).

      The "&cid=CAESEeD2JLJzL1dBgUZFbmBGP-fz" string which follows is clearly an identifier for the "client ID", or the Universe really is entirely devoid of meaning or logic. (YMMV. Or, y'know, not.)

      That, in turn, is followed by "&sig=AOD64_3I39rwK0_DYxkNqTS1PJcvi8-iYg", which is pretty obviously a digital signature, probably included to prevent clickjackers from gaming google's revenue stream - or because google just likes to admire its own signature. (My own bet would be on security, rather than self-regard, btw.)

      Finally, we have "&q=&ved=0ahUKEwi42ZGrkavWAhVoxlQKHWkNCfwQ0QwIJQ", followed by "&adurl=", the first part of which looks like a query string to me, with the last bit pointing to a null value. My guess is that, absent an actual value for "&adurl=", it causes the AI to redirect your browser to the client's default URL, per their contract with googleadservices. (Again, contents are packed by weight, not volume, and some settling may occur during shipping.)

      Contrast all that with the non-ad link that the search string "procter and gamble" generates, which is simply "http://us.pg.com/".

      In other words, "It's all about the Benjamins."

      You're welcome ...

      • by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @10:27PM (#55212507) Journal

        In other words, "It's all about the Benjamins."

        Nice post. Average click-through rate is about 2%, and the average price to the advertiser is $1-2.00 US.

      • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:08PM (#55212587) Journal

        Contrast all that with the non-ad link that the search string "procter and gamble" generates, which is simply "http://us.pg.com/".

        I searched for Procter and Gamble, then right-clicked on the first non-ad link that google shows. Here is the URL (remember, this isn't an ad):
        https://www.google.com/url?sa=... [google.com]

      • The "ai" refers to "advertising/advertisement id". "Advertising Id" would imply it's an ID for the user; "Advertisement ID" would imply it's an ID for the ad itself.

      • You all should install the Google search link fix [mozilla.org] Firefox add-on.
      • by jetkust ( 596906 )
        Thanks for the detailed response! I am aware the point of an ad is to route the traffic differently in the name of the Benjamins. I used the word "directly" to describe the search result and not the ad, though who really knows. In the end, I'm not thinking much of any of this in practice. Just what is the quickest way to get to the web site I'm thinking about. Honestly, I trust google enough to believe that either click wouldn't end in me buying bitcoins to pay the Russians to recover my stash of gol
      • by trawg ( 308495 ) on Sunday September 17, 2017 @03:07AM (#55212987) Homepage

        Contrast all that with the non-ad link that the search string "procter and gamble" generates, which is simply "http://us.pg.com/".

        True BUT! When you click on that link (in most browsers without active defenses) you'll see that the click is intercepted and it fires off a POST request to Google anyway, tracking the click, with a link that looks something like:

        https://www.google.co.uk/gen_2... [google.co.uk] string]&s=2&v=2&pv=0.[random number]&me=54:[random number],V,0,0,0,0:6834,h,1,52,i:49,h,1,52,o:214,h,1,51... [many more bits of data] 1,e,C&zx=[some other number]

        That will then redirect you to the destination site.

        You won't notice it unless you're really tracking requests - if you mouseover the us.pg.com link it doesn't show the Google tracker. If you inspect the source it just looks like a regular HREF link.

  • Some is worthless, some is not. For example, Amazon advertises products you have looked at in your Facebook feed, and I'm sure those ads are well worth it for Amazon.

    • by fermion ( 181285 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @09:45PM (#55212401) Homepage Journal
      It was a hundred years ago a department store owner said half his advertising budget is wasted, but he did know which half.

      The difference is now that we can see which half is working, if we measure it by immediate purchases. If you pay for ad, and it does not result in a sale, then is it working? Some would say no.

      In a way we are back to the mode of print advertising a hundred years ago. A store runs an ad for a sale, the store can then look to see if revenue increases for the day, and then judge if the ad works. Since that ad is likely run on many outlets, one can't say exactly which ad works. This is what is different now.

      But that misses the advertising model of the past 50 years, which is branding and long term returns. You advertise beer on the Super Bowl not just to get sales today, but so the kids will hopefully buy your beer later. You give away a magnum of expensive alcohol to soccer players not to sell the alcohol right then, but to connect with the fans that when they celebrate they are going to buy it.

      So maybe branding is still a thing. Maybe putting the Amazon name everywhere is valuable. The problem with advertising and the dot com crisis was that there was an incestuous relationship between advertising dollars and advertisers. it was actually the same money looping around from one had to another, with no value being created. That is no longer the problem. it is that the 'new economy' people still think they have found a new economics, and the cost of acquiring customers can be reduced to zero.

  • by Rick Zeman ( 15628 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:31PM (#55212183)

    ...or someone who said half of his advertising budget was wasted...but identifying which half was the problem?

  • Folks;

    I am one of those who ads do not do any good.

    I am the one who uses lynx (linux text mode browser) that does not bother with pop ups. I get the text of the article without the pop overs. Therefore I do not see about 80 percent of the ads on sites.

    And I cannot be the only one doing this. . . .

    • I am the one who uses lynx (linux text mode browser) that does not bother with pop ups. I get the text of the article without the pop overs. Therefore I do not see about 80 percent of the ads on sites.

      And I cannot be the only one doing this. . . .

      I use uBlock Origin with Firefox (inb4 "botnet pls"), and i only visit faecebook about once every six months - usually to plant stories about buying boats that I don't actually own, to throw off their analytics. As for the effectiveness of advertising, I'd like to see some figures for the relationship of click-throughs to purchases. Any number of times when I have lowered myself to clicking on one of the few ads I do see, I have very quickly decided "that's not what I was after" and abandoned the chase.

    • by lucm ( 889690 )

      So you must be visiting Pornhub for the articles.

  • What does this mean for Google's future?
    • Everything turns into shareware and you have to register your gmail every year or else you can only send 64 characters per message.

  • An old idea (Score:4, Informative)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:44PM (#55212231) Journal
    The idea that if your brand is not been seen everyday it gets selected less and less when a consumer goes shopping. The other band that spent big on new ads got selected for been new. A consumer has the need to try a new look competitor again due to more new ads.
    No matter how near a monopoly a brand gets due to quality or price it has to keep spending big on its name as if it was entering the market.
    Classic TV, print, radio, billboards ads gave way to banner ads and deep tracking internet ads. Anything to keep humans seeing the trusted brand name and its products everyday.
    The new problem for the ads is the old separation of TV, print, radio, billboard ads is now their direct online competitor. Social media wants to sell and build their own trusted consumer and entertainment brands.
    Private label https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] and other ways computer company/social media owners/shopping sites now want to sell are replacing or buying up decades of generations trusted names.
    Browsers are considering blocking outside ads. Social media and online shopping push their own new brands or partners that profit share.
    The need for ads has not changed. The way select products get presented on a few captive platforms has changed.
  • Certainly it is, it cherry picked the one example it could find supporting its clickbaity headline and then congratulated itself on all the clicks, and subsequent advertising money, it got itself for doing so. Proctor and Gamble just cut back to the advertising space it found most effective, it didn't stop it all together. Nor did the company in question suggest it was going to stop advertising all together. The general consensus of the conference was that online advertising should be more targeted than the
  • by Ken_g6 ( 775014 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:50PM (#55212261)

    Just in time, coin mining [slashdot.org] is coming to replace ads.

    I suppose the next step will be to make all links internal to a site with ajax, so the coin mining script can run continuously as long as a user is on the site.

  • by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:55PM (#55212277)

    My observation in retail has been that appeal to brand loyalty is the most effective form of advertising. You probably aren't surprised by that, but you likely don't realize how insane it gets. It's extremely common for my customers to think an HP printer will work better with an HP computer.

    As for advertising: Fake reviews. They work. You don't even have to explicitly buy them; give someone a free product and they'll give it five stars about 90% of the time. Doesn't hurt that Amazon customers reliably upvote five star reviews and reliably downvote negative reviews.

  • Whenever I see a food advertisement, and I have it at home, I feel the urge to eat. It turns into a sale later, after it's gone.
  • by borcharc ( 56372 ) *

    Yes it is. The only ad's that I see these days are reasonably well-targeted youtube ads on my kid's device. Those are just the same as broadcast commercials. The rest is garbage.

  • The three ad types are:

    1) Sales. Click here to instantly buy this thing we are advertising. This is the most common and the most useless. You can measure it's effectiveness exactly, which is what makes them popular. But they are remarkably uneffective. If you want to buy it now, you google it. (Or just go to amazon/ebay/etsy directly)

    2) Branding. Hey, remember our product? We still sell it. People in X group love us. We are cool. You want to be cool right? When you need product like ours, r

  • Here's an advertising idea: instead of paying for a click on the ad, pay only when the click results in a sale. (Surely modern tracking technology can figure out whether that happened.) Then you'll have a 100% accurate measure of effectiveness. If Google won't agree to it (and of course they won't), start a competing company that will.

    Of course successful clicks will have a significantly higher price, but you pay only when the product is sold. Just like a salesman who is paid a commission only when a

  • I've mostly seen the advertisers coming back. There's a lot of stuff out there I just plain don't need but that I might actually want. If you don't advertise to me I honestly forget the stuff exists. Video games are an obvious choice. But there's other stuff like computer hardware upgrades, cool parts for my bike and other misc hobby stuff. And when I still had a kid under my roof there was the nonstop cavalcade of adverts for cloths and movies she was into.
  • Ad-tech generally means google. I'm a consistent increase in anti-google news articles recently (some justified, some just speculative to add fear, uncertainty, doubt). I wonder who is pushing it?
  • Rubles (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Nethead ( 1563 )

    I don't know, the Russians sure did a lot with $100,000 in Facebook buys. Maybe they just know their 'consumers' better.

  • Online ads have become far too annoying for me to pay any attention to them. Just because the advertisers are able to place ads in front of me, they think that those ads leave me with a positive impression of the company and its products. On the contrary, I shun the products that are advertised to me in an annoying manner.
  • by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:00PM (#55212569)

    Advertising anywhere is wasteful. The problem for all those advertisers is that they are selling commodities. Products and services that are indistinguishable from (or inferior to) their competitors.

    The solution for those people is simply to produce a better product. As we hear daily on this site; Apple didn't invent the music player, the cell phone or the tablet device--but they made them better. They made them compellingly functional and attractive. While HP, Compaq, IBM and others were assembling generic parts into ugly desktop boxes, Apple was offering colorful, graceful computers that just happened to appear on every interesting TV show. Many consumers were influenced by the look and a growing reputation for ease of use, reliability and service after the sale.

    Smart Americans are buying more Toyotas, Nissans, Hyundais and fewer Chevys and Chryslers. Nissans? Damn, most are UGLY! But they have a good reputation for reliability. I bought a Papa John's pizza today- their slogan: Better Ingredients, Better Pizza.

    It works the other way too. Walmart has a reputation for lowest prices, which is enough to bring in hordes of buyers. Nordstrom's has a reputation for quality and service that places them high in retail sales. Radio Shack had a market niche that faded away and they couldn't adapt. Every seller needs a unique place in the market or they will have to advertise like crazy.

    So long as there are commodities, there will be sales costs. The best investment for products is not advertising, but R&D topped off with functional and/or fashionable design principles. And IP protection. And reputation over the long term.

    • by waspleg ( 316038 )

      Papa Johns is horrible shit - they just know what you want to hear and spam that; like Trump.

  • that that spending that

    Will someone PLEASE introduce the editors to the works of Strunk and white?!

  • by darkain ( 749283 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:44PM (#55212649) Homepage

    Twitter is fucking worthless. But we all already knew this. But just for shits and giggles, lemmie tell ya some numbers.

    Twitter gave me one of those ad trials for their service, a free $100 credit to try them out as an advertising system.

    My company received a 0% click-through rate.

    I guess I got exactly what I paid for, absolutely nothing. But one thing was for sure, Twitter made sure I absolutely NEVER gave them any actual money for advertising, since it was literally useless and worthless for my business.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      What exactly was the content of your advert? It's hard to judge where the problem lies without knowing how effective your pitch was.

  • For me... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bartles ( 1198017 ) on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:49PM (#55212663)

    ...ads are either blocked by software or my mental ability to completely tune them out as visual noise. If I want something I search for it.

  • It's less than worthless.

  • Let's suppose this trend continues, and the whole online advertising business goes down the tubes. When they can no longer claim it's "ad revenue", how will Google account for all the black budget money they get from fedgov and other repressive regimes in payment for conducting mass surveillance?

  • Thereâ(TM)s a larger issue: Retail spending (not adjusted for inflation) has grown on average 2.4% per year in the US over the past five years. Over the same period, digital advertising nearly doubled to $72.5 billion in 2016. Clearly, even digital advertising â" despite the lure of Facebook and the like â" cannot induce consumers overall to spend more and increase the size of the overall pie for advertisers. It can only, at best, divide up the pie differently

    People only have so much money to

  • Jaron Lanier — 'Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth.'

  • About 3 years ago I performed a little experiment.
    Had 20 EUR to spend. Spent them on Google AdSense (or AdWords? well whatever) to boost my Youtube channel which had many (unmonetized) World of Tanks replays. This was not to make any money, but to verify what would happen if I did go that way.
    That 20 EUR lasted about a week, during which the amount of views of my channel increased tenfold, from about 200 accesses a week to over 2000. then it dropped straight back to 200-something a week.

    Now, the question in

  • by duke_cheetah2003 ( 862933 ) on Sunday September 17, 2017 @03:06PM (#55215259) Homepage

    Back in the day, when advertising on the web was just a simple banner ad that appeared on a page, things were good, we didn't feel a need to install advertising blockers, cuz they weren't disruptive to our experience of web browsing.

    Fast forward and the rise of pop ups, pop under, video, sound, splitting articles into multiple pages so you get more advertising thrust in your face. So most of us said enough is enough and the rise of the ad blocker occurred. And now they wonder why advertising is so ineffective? You guys did it to yourselves, you made yourselves so frickin' obnoxious and a bane of the browsing experience, we've tuned you out, either with our brains solely, or with technology to assist in removing your garbage from our monitors.

Hackers are just a migratory lifeform with a tropism for computers.

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