borisvvz

Save it only for the worst scammers then

I created a bot that sorts my inbox contacts to MailChimp and Pipedrive. Saves me hours of copy-pasting...

The Next Web experimented with a pro account that removed ads. That has been discontinued but the site is still very much alive.

I don't think advertising is a antiquated but banners are. We are trying something new and this is it. It's new and needs to be fine-tuned but we hope it will be less annoying than seeing banners all over a page. Give us another chance or at least keep an open mind.

I think adblockers will catch up soon enouygh, and that's fine.

Got it. We will try to fix that by providingg clearer instructions and maybe speeding up the animation.

Point taken. We will try to improve/fix both issues.

We don't mention the 'c' key anywhere yet and have only implemented it a few days ago after a reader suggested it. We are testing it now and really like it so will make it more clear asap.

I'll focus on proving more clear instructions for now based on your feedback.

All great feedback. Will how much we can implement and how fast.

As I said in other comments: that's fine. And we will improve our ads even more over time.

Hmm no, thats now how that works. If you browse aroudn the site we don't show the ad. If you visit new from twitter or google or facebook we show yyou the ad once. When you go to a second page we don't show it anymore. So when you open a private window it assumes you are new and shows you the ad.

As far as I know adblockers aren't blocking our Canvas ads yet. I don't mind if they do though. I think it is better to give up trying to make money on people who really hate ads and instead focus on people who don't mind them. Feel free to read our content with an adlocker. I just hope to tweet or like our stuff every now and then. :-)

I thought about that a lot of course! I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and worked on the canvas ad with the design & dev team for months. We do know some people absolutely hate ads. No matter how small. And this one is huge! But we figured the upside of having a beautiful ad that more people would like would be worth the downside of losing a few people who hate any ad and probably even use an adblocker. I don't dislike people who use adblockers and think it is fine if they read our site for free and without making us any money. But if you do I also don't think you have mucch right to complain about ads anyway.

That's too bad. We did test it extensively and although some people were distracted by the ads, they do understand theres a post hovering on the right that wants to move back into the page. But we are working on ways to make this more clear. I do understand this is a big difference from the ads you see on other websites and we do hope you'll give them another chance.

I agree that's ironic and something we (I'm TNW's CEO and worked closely with the dev them on this) should work on. I also believe we built this for the future and computers will catch up with some of the more innovative stuff we built. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't make it better and we will. We are improving the code and functionality every day so the canvas ad you might see today (we don't show them on every visit) might be better than the one you've seen yesterday.

That looks awful and somethign we should fix. Passed it on to #dev. Boris (CEO TNW)

That would be a shame because we can produce some awesome content because we have an advertising model that works. Also, if you visit TNW through the front page you won't see an ad. ANd if you go to a story directly you only see an ad every now and then. I hope you give us another try. Boris (CEO TNW)

A screenshot doesn't do it much justice. What other people don't see is that the article is moving in a bit and a hover or 'c' key moves it in completely. If you think the ad looks too big, pick up any paper magazine and look at those ads. In my Wired magazine it takes 7 pages to get to the content. We show you ONE ful page ad that is easy to ignore and generates revenue that enables us to hire writers and provide you with free content. Not such a shitty deal after all? Boris (CEO TNW)

I wrote that. I'm the founder and CEO of TNW and came up with part of the Canvas ad. After I pitched the idea of developing a sexy interstitial that would work intuitively and easy to use our designer and dev team came up with this, and I love it. I also understand your frustration. I know this is a bigger ad than you are used to. I also think you'll get used to it if you give it another chance. I see advertisers love it and we see readers tweeting about ads (when was the last time you even looked at an ad, clicked on one, or tweeted about one because you liked it? Right!) and mostly we get positive replies. And then there's a group of people who absolutely HATE them. So, we are trying to improve them as much as possible to make everybody love them, or at least not hate them as much. First thing you could try: hit the 'c' on your keyboard when you hit a Canvas ad and it will magically disappear. We will make it a lot better over the next week but always appreciate input. So contact me here, or at boris@thenextweb.com with anything you've got.

We do a similar thing when (annoying) sales people call. You can try to get rid of them as soon as possible. But it is more annoying to them to keep them occupied as long as possible. When I'm disturbed during dinner by ANOTHER newspaper sales call I'll first politely try to say I'm not interested. If they don't take the hit I change tactics and say 'You know, That DOES sound interesting. Let me talk to my wife for a moment' and put the phone down and go back to dinner. 10 minutes later you can just hang up the phone.

I think even Bill Gates would appreciate the extra info and know he can expect an email from me within 3 days. Then imagine his surprise when I reply within an hour.

In fact, that is what I did with every investor and journalist that emailed me. I replied to most within minutes.

I'll make a note of that. Sounds very cool and useable…

Spot on!

I 'invented' it… :-)

The 'Yes/no' reply button has an option to add one tweet length of text. So my answer might be "No - but ask me again next week as I have time then". It also has a "This is not a yes/no question" button which allows me to invite the sender to reclassify the question.

Still in closed beta so the stats are based on all my test mails. As I keep a bunch of them in Yes/No to play with sorting this screws up the current stats. Should be more reliable when actively used…