Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"?
How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?
I'd love for it to literally be "half ads" - whereas Twitter Plebeian gets a full add, Twitter Bluesbros only see the top half of the ad.
Could result in amusing ads where the top half is aimed at the richies and the bottom half has "stick it to the man" discounts that only poors would see.
Actually, user segmentation and giving discounts to poor people only on the same ad is absolutely brilliant, it’s elon-muskesque style of brilliance. It’s everything together: “Stick it to the man”, the rich can’t really complain, it’s correct i terms of user segmentation, and it’s a good joke too.
In other words, it is that it's going to be very difficult for users to intuitively understand what "half ads" means and why they should pay for it.
It's a completely nonsensical compromise. Musk's product ideas for Twitter seems to assume that what everyone wants is for Twitter to be more complex, with more knobs to fiddle with.
There's a simple way to make this legible to the user: instead of slashing ad frequency, eliminate half of ad surface. I.e. if there are N places on the page where ads are being served, turn off half of them for the paying users. This will be an obvious difference, and remain so even as the ad intensity/frequency increases.
but there aren't N places on the page where ads are shown, there's one place: in the feed, at an unspecified frequency as you scroll. twitter doesn't have any ad surfaces to eliminate.
Half of ads is strictly more valuable than all of them. Whether or not it's worth $8 is another question, but people still forget it's all a supplier-driven market: there is, and is not going to be, an option to pay $8 and get no ads. You choose out of what's being made available.
> But if it's only 10% less annoying, there's very little incentive to buy.
Right. But that $8 doesn't only buy you halving the ad load, but also all the other things like better reach and the "I'm a paying user, I'm better than you non-paying ones" checkmark. I mean, if it works on GitHub...
> And adblock is an option sitting in the wings.
Yes, but! Most people use Twitter through the app, and blocking ads there isn't as simple as having your tech-savvy friend install uBlock Origin in your browser. Adblocking in apps is, even for techies, something between extremely sophisticated and downright impossible.
Google used to have that one thing that said "pay us and we will make some of the ads on the Internet go away." You paid Google, and then Google eliminated ads on their websites but also ads on any website that used Google to provide their ads, and Google paid those websites as if they had shown those ads. It was a really nice idea, but it had the downside of only affecting ads on a random (from the user's perspective) subset of the Internet. Also had the downside that if you're the sort of person willing to pay to make ads go away, you're probably also a happy ad block user.
Thought the same thing. How do you prove top me as the user that I'm seeing "half as many ads" now that I'm paying $8? No ads is easy. They are there or they aren't.
I'd considering paying Twitter $8/month if it was no ads. Or, you know, I just keep using Tweetbot for $10/year and there's zero ads there and a straight reverse chronological timeline to boot.
Yeah the only way this could work is if the ads were replaced with a banner that says "thanks for paying", so you can actually see how many ads were removed. Which is a better experience than seeing an ad but worse than an ad blocker.
> Thought the same thing. How do you prove top me as the user that I'm seeing "half as many ads" now that I'm paying $8? No ads is easy. They are there or they aren't.
They'll just double-up ads for non-paying users in the current ad slots on the feed.
You will be shown no ads from the hours of 8pm-8am, a bunch during your busiest times, or some such.
In any case, how are people going to verify on their end they're getting what they paid for? Maybe in 10 years they'll have a class action resulting in everyone getting a dollar back.
It's pretty well-known for traditional television broadcasts, right? Shows are edited and even scripted specifically to provide the right amount of slots for ads.
It's much harder to measure television ad impressions than digital ad impressions.
Publishers charge for digital ad impressions by the 1000. It's easy to measure because usually they receive an HTTP GET request indicating the ad has been served.
For TV that uses traditional broadcasts you have to sample and scale. This is what Nielsen and other ACR companies do.
(and on top of that, most of the organic content is now locked in time-limited stories, with a good chunk of them being reposts of TikTok influencers out there to definitely sell you something)
> Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"?
Broadcast television and radio have always done this. How could they do anything else?
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
From a user perspective it's messy and confusing. What does "half as many" even mean? The experience is only different in degree, not in kind. There's less value, both real and perceived, in such a position.
It's hard to imagine that the conversation started from "half as many." My hunch is that it started as "no ads" and somehow backed down to "half" for one reason or another.
A couple reasons I can imagine are:
- They could've justified No Ads at the rumored $20 price point. Cut the price in half? Add half the ads back.
- They want to make room for a $20 SKU later and need to reserve some features for it, which could include getting rid of all ads.
- They want to anchor at "half" so that "No Ads" sounds even better if they change their minds down the line.
Why do you have that hunch? Do you presume good will? My hunch says, what if the conversation started as "how do we make users believe there will be less ads"?
Burning Twitter to the ground seems quite counterproductive, given the debt that was assumed for the sale. Misguided sure, but bad faith? I generally tend to assume that most people do things in good faith.
Because I am not a heavy enough Twitter user for this to affect me at all, so I'm just curious to see if Musk's gamble works. He's gambling that the network effect is as important for Verified users as it is for non-Verified users, which is not a bet most other creator-based social media sites have made. Judging by the number/temperature of comments you've made about this topic over the last two days, I think you're a lot more emotionally invested in this topic than I am. I'm just here with popcorn.
I'm not a twitter user either, I'm not sure what that has to do with viewing Musk's actions as either being good or bad faith. That seems like a limiting and bizarre way to view things. Similarly, I didn't accuse you of being inappropriately emotionally invested... I'm more fascinated that people see someone doing something wildly illogical and then say to themselves, "well it's Musk, he must have his reasons"... yeah, I'm sure he has his reasons. That doesn't mean they are good and I have no idea why anyone would assume so given how all of this transpired.
> Similarly, I didn't accuse you of being inappropriately emotionally invested...
Sorry I think I read something that wasn't there, apologies. My bad for being jumpy.
> I'm more fascinated that people see someone doing something wildly illogical and then say to themselves, "well it's Musk, he must have his reasons"... yeah, I'm sure he has his reasons. That doesn't mean they are good and I have no idea why anyone would assume so given how all of this transpired.
For me it's curiosity. Twitter always seems like the struggling social media. Unable to really make a revenue despite it's disproportionate influence in developed nation discourse. At this point, I consider Musk to be a loose canon and I would not do business with him unless costs appropriately reflected risks.
All good. I definitely agree regarding Twitter and I would also not want to do business with Musk. Hence my incredulousness with the thought of any generosity, intellectual or otherwise, being thrown his way.
Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"?
How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?