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lapnitnelav

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Dublin.

Indie minion of the online ads ecosystem.

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Yeah sure let's bury our head in the sand and pretend all forms of media will thrive while only selling subscriptions but so far, we've seen how it went for the older ones (newspaper, radio, tv ...)

Or we can acknowledge that advertisment is there to stay and we instead develop a proper framework to make it work sanely rather than all the duct-taping we've done so far.

The real failure is the unwillingness to confront the fact that ads were there to stay and should have been baked into a W3C standard ages ago instead but here we are.

What's the solution? If anything, the proliferation of ad tech junk and 15MB of various ad-related things is probably better than just that 1MB of only Google Ads scripts, no?

Or are we going to talk about how online advertising has been the economic backbone of the web? Not that I'm advocating for it, by hiding the true cost of things, publishers have brought this onto themselves really.

So no more ads? That's probably going to kill a lot of sites, whether they are contributing anything to mankind or not.

No, I have been hanging around in Discord for a while now and I've run quite often into issues with connection issues for specific servers (I guess some clusters going down) and them being OOO for a while.

Mumble on the other hand tends to be pretty reliable and comes back up in a few seconds anyway whenever it fails.

On top of what has already been said, I found Mumble to be a better voice com tool than Discord, sound quality is better, shortcut mapping more extensive, etc ...

Discord having the slack-like features, video streaming and social networking integrated in a nice UI makes it a better all purpose consummer product unfortunately.

Oh boy, if you have never worked for a bank, you would be inclined to believe they have this shit down to a T after being such early adopters of tech and all the risks they undertake given their roles.

Turns out that it's best to ignore how the sausage is made.

Reminds me a lot of my uncle that had sort of taken over my grand-parent's farm and never really moved away from there.

I can definitely empathise with his mindset, especially after many years in the city. Though being from a culinary-centered culture, the one size fits all meal is really depressing to think about, especially that he probably can get some really good produce from people in his network.

Being a farmer is really something different and here in Western Europe (I'm going to assume there's not that much difference between UK and FR farming cultures), it's really a labour of love.

I've been lucky to have some exposure to this world through my family and people often have the wrong perception of it and quite often looked down upon by people that should know better.

Why I Work on Ads 5 years ago

No, actually you can do both (and more).

Advertising is throwing darts at the board with your eyes closed, whenever it lands somewhere on the board and nets you point is good enough for most.

Typical conversion rates are under the 1% threshold so you accept that a lot of your spend is not efficient but when it is, you make your money back and some, if you are any good at it.

Crazy New Ideas 5 years ago

Fascinating video as always from Jonathan.

Definitely highlights something I've always felt, which is that we're really making life complicated with all those tools and processes that are less than ideal.

I get the feeling business and the need to "ship" stuff is the thing really bringing technology down, even though it looks like it's moving it forward.

Why I Work on Ads 5 years ago

That's because the companies winning bidds on your 'views' are targeting you because of your apparent persona, i.e middle aged man/woman in tech -aka middle class ++ with disposable income, rather than what you are interested in.

On top of that, plenty of marketers are absolutely clueless about how to go about their strategy, mostly because unlike previous generations (in online ads), they don't grok the underlying tech at all.

DigitalOcean S-1 5 years ago

Hello, I'm the $50 / month customer.

Not an internet business per say, mostly used in the context of processing and storing data + internal apps.

Do is great value, although not the cheapest. They need to double down on the useful items, maybe go a bit offroad in what they offer, lest they might be a in rough spot.

Inutile donc indispensable.

Have to admire the dedication you've put into that. Us casual line-riders spent a few hours at best and moved on onto the next shiny thing and there's there people like you that went above and beyond. A labour of love.

This so much.

One of the main reason the big players dominate the Web (in the marketing space) so much is because SaaS is easier to handle (for most people) than having to deploy and maintain your infra.

if you streamline the process so that your regular SMB can build their digital infrastructure and maintain their private data clouds, it would go a long way to help us all with privacy.

A suite of open-source / on premise license one stop shop.

1) Google, thanks to its acquisitions / strategies is actually all over the web, and has a hand in every single part of the ad tech stack (outside of walled gardens). It's problematic

2) As a consequence of #1 (all those Google Analytics install collecting data) and their properties (YT, Search, etc...) they have excellent data on pretty much every one.

As a matter of fact, someone in the industry made a test on Grindr to see what kind of audience quality each player had in the adtech world. Google was the best provider and by a large margin.

As long as you have a (sub) domain you can use and a bit of free time, you could go to your favourite cheap 'cloud' provider, i.e. Digital Ocean, Scaleway, ...

Spin up a cheap instance (DO has a preconfigured image ready to go), git pull and caprover deploy to test. I am pretty sure even the cheapest ones will be able to run that.

It also doesn't solve the issue that ads are trying to address in the first place, which is to promote your business.

If you outright ban ads, they'll come back in a sneaky way, see influencer marketing / product placement in culture (movies mostly) for how it plays out.

It also prevents smaller businesses to compete with the larger ones because the larger ones have much more clout and branding power.

Not that it makes ads perfect, far from it. But at least ads are transparent unlike all the astro-turfing there is out there.

I am particularly saddened by how Europe has handled the situation.

Not that I can blame the EU because I'm pretty sure it couldn't have done (as in imposed) anything there and it clearly highlights the deficiencies of being somewhere in the middle.

It was a litmus test and it's pretty obvious that we need to take it further rather than competing with each other.

I didn't really experience the 08 crisis directly but the aftermath for sure as I got my degree in 10 and the market in my home country was really bad at that time.

Had to go back to my less than stellar family for a year and a half, all of us surviving on the struggling family business while slaving away pretty much all the time.

Got a way out to move to Belfast and build a career slowly moving up from shit job to less shit job.

While lots of it has sucked, in hindsight it was the best thing that happened to me.

So you know, there might be a silver lining, maybe it's even platinum but you can't even tell yet.

Thanks for sharing that Harvard's course.

The cost benefit analysis part reminds me a lot of some of the comments you see here (and elsewhere) with regards to Covid-19 and the economic shutdown of societies. Quite timely.