A Bigger, Greedier Dog: Greed may be a solution to move towards Humane Technology

  1. How do you plan on getting advertisers and ads?
  2. Is this just for USA web surfers?
  3. Why would anyone install an app to visit websites?
  4. Do people really have the problem of “the websites I’m using for free are just not paying me”?
  5. Would it make sense for all revenue to go to publishers?
  6. Aren’t you trying to solve too many problems at once?
  7. Aren’t you in a near-impossible situation where you need to build 3 different customers groups simultaniously: readers, publishers and advertisers
  8. Wouldn’t it be much easier if you only needed to be getting publishers on board?
  9. What if you only solved one problem, removing tracking from ads, making ads just based on context and user IP location?

I’m of the opinion that we have far too much media. We could have less. You mention “responsibly” published content, but even the most respected news sites in the world are publishing sensationalist headlines, fake news and running “popular” stories instead of what is actually important. The result is news is fiction. The cause in part is money-motivation.

I would think with less money-motivation in media, quality could actually go up.

My sits is in the reference category. The reason why 23% of impressions make 90% of revenue is users have different geographies, different behavioral targeting, view different content and there are different ad locations (“placements”). The same would be true of every site.

Well the kinds of ads you describe are among the “healthiest” ads possible. But healthy is the wrong word to use here since ads in general aren’t healthy for the viewer. That’s why I use the terms higher quality and more appropriate.

Red Bull is sugar water (sugar is like a drug, water is just water) mixed with caffeine (another drug). Sugary beverages are considered so harmful that multiple governments have actual laws specifically taxing them and also limiting where they can be sold and advertised.

About 180,000 people die every year due to consuming sugary beverages. Their consumption increases the chance of early death bt 31%. One reason people drink them is because of ads.

Ads > Drink sugary drinks > Bad health > Death

Is there any question that this is literally blood money?

Why would you ever think of Red Bull ads as being healthy?

There is a genuine need as a publsher to make more revenue. I’ve had 14 million visits last year, but have received only US 40,000 from display ads.

Another concern I have for your model is that maybe you want to run hi-revenue interstitial video. You know there has been a lot of negative things about video ads in non-video content, and interstitial landing page ads are considered so “disturbing” that they’re penalised by Google search.

I think better solutions are now:

  1. Limiting to one ad per view maximum
  2. Limiting size of ads to some small percentage of screen size
  3. No tracking, targeting etc whatsoever
  4. High quality ads
  5. Ads that visually match content, such as so-called “native” ads. No stupid ads in rectangles. Instead ads with backgrounds that match the page background (transparent backgrounds). Different shapes!
  6. All ads 100% responsive-sized. Seriously! No standard ad sizes whatsoever.
  7. No blank spaces if ads are blocked / empty
  8. No iframes
  9. Ads load at same time as page
  10. Ads should be tiny in size (bytes), ie one image or just some text with a link
  11. No JavaScript in ads! Seriously.
  12. Ads load directly from publisher server, or from a trusted place with no tracking
  13. All ads and ad link targets verified by a human before published
  14. All impressions recorded in an open public database, including who is paying for the ad (the final payer), the ad content, the page URL, the user location and time

So yes some wild ideas here. Insane! But could it be possible, if the publisher’s own analytics system (running JavaScript on the front end) was tracking viewability of ads? And there was some way to verify that the analytics are real?

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