Snapchat Will Introduce Ads, Attempt To Keep Them Other Than Creepy 131
As reported by VentureBeat, dissapearing-message service Snapchat is introducing ads. Considering how most people feel about ads, they're trying to ease them in gently: "Ads can be ignored: Users will not be required to watch them. If you do view an ad, or if you ignore it for 24 hours, it will disappear just like Stories do." Hard to say how much it will mollify the service's users, but the company says "We won’t put advertisements in your personal communication – things like Snaps or Chats. That would be totally rude. We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted."
The first one is always free (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how it always starts. In a few years, more ads than content.
You are not the customer. You are the product.
Re: The first one is always free (Score:3, Insightful)
The advertiser is the customer, but we are the user, not simply the product. It's an important distinction. The companies that have done the best in social networks have focused more on the user. Obviously they're going to have to get money somehow. Advertisements is one way. They could also start charging to use the service. One or the other is inevitable and if it's a big problem for you, the user, then you're free to stop using it.
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So why not give us an option to pay?
Any relationship where the real customer is a third party tends to become an abusive relationship.
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It doesn't have to be one of those two, though that's what you usually end up with. Even if you start out based on pure altruism, once you get popular enough your expenses usually rise almost in proportion, and in the end the service must either die from congestion or you have to get money to expand it somehow.
What ties popularity of the service to increased costs is the centralized server model. More users means more bandwidth, processing and support is needed. If you're responsible for all (or any) of tho
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Part of the latter is that it can make it far more difficult to datamine or snoop on the content.
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Exactly, a customer pays for a product. If you don't pay then you are not a customer you are just a user. The company has to make money somehow. Paying for a service by reading ads is a reasonable solution.
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It's sucking up bandwidth, and clogging the tubes. The fickle market will decide if it's worth it.
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The main reason ads are a viable business model is that most people don't mind them and those that do know how to get rid of them.
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You are not the consumer, you are the consumbles
Ads, by DEFAULT, are creepy! (Score:2)
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As perverted as it may sound. yes. Your watching is being sold to the one that wants you to see the commercial.
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Your spam annoys me.
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Huh? What video ads?
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Huh? What video ads?
I'm with you... and I'm also still wondering what that "Disable Advertising" check box near the top right corner of each page is all about...
Nope. (Score:2)
All of the nope.
Show me ads, I block them or go elsewhere.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I used to love punching the monkey, now all I get to do is choke the chicken.
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I've often wondered why services like Facebook, Google, Snapchat and others don't just give their users the option of paying for the service in order to be left free from ads and tracking?
My guess is that it's because if consumers ever saw the real value that these services and their customers (the advertisers) place on our attention and our personal information, we would be a lot more careful about giving it away.
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Interesting that you bring that up. I'm a long-time subscriber to Slashdot, but a few months ago, the subscription page stopped working for me. I simply cannot add money to my subscription. When I try to click the radio button for "Buy subscription for Pope Ratzo" nothing happens.
I've got Slashdot whitelisted in all of my blockers and Privacy Badger and Disonnect and I've tried it in Chrome and Firefox. It just does not work any
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Interesting that you bring that up. I'm a long-time subscriber to Slashdot, but a few months ago, the subscription page stopped working for me. I simply cannot add money to my subscription. When I try to click the radio button for "Buy subscription for Pope Ratzo" nothing happens.
I've got Slashdot whitelisted in all of my blockers and Privacy Badger and Disonnect and I've tried it in Chrome and Firefox. It just does not work any more.
The system where you can earn ad-free still works, and is how I get it. My problem is less that I'd pay for ad-free and more that I'd noticed that my malware issues went away when I started running adblockers.
I actually have whitelisted a few places and adservs that make a point of making sure their ads will be safe--which also does in Flash ads because honestly it's probably easier to just ban them entirely than to vet them. I don't mind ads, I actually am a bit fond of the few that outright let me tell ad
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Look at any discussion of web ads at /. - there are tons and tons of comments going "Oh, if only web companies let us pay to turn ads off!"... And not a single one of those comments is marked with a *.
You know, that mark you get as an extra when you pay to turn ads on /. off.
I wonder if this is a part of the reason.
That's almost certainly not true because I'm always chiming in on those threads.
I can't find it now (which pisses me off to no end; my search fu is usually better than this), but there was a study published claiming that replacing ads with micropayments would cost users less than a dollar a day. Slashdot subscriptions are cheap. If people knew that they existed (I found out by reading through the FAQ on one boring day) or if they still worked (apparently?), I think that more people would chose to buy them.
T
micropayment COST more than they generate.1 succes (Score:2)
Micro payments would need to GENERATE few dollars per day for site owners. That doesn't say anything about what they COST. If I fill out a payment form to pay 10 cents for a howto, that generates 10 cents for the bank and site to split, but it costs a few minutes. The typical Slashdot reader probably sells their time at over $1/minute, so it costs ten times as much as the site owner gets.
Sure there is no law of physics that says it must cost a lot, but if spammers send millions of emails hoping for an av
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I think this is what makes Bitcoin and Dogecoin and the other cryptocurrencies so interesting.
There is hardly any overhead in paying people, it's fast.
It's like paying a street performer with cash.
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It's through his enemies, not his friends, that man learned to build walls.
And it was ads that taught me how much fun it is to manipulate the content before displaying it.
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Not really. Most ads I get to see are for products that you can get either free or at least cheaper elsewhere.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!! (Score:2)
To do targeted advertising, you have to collect data about people, say by processing the messages that have accumulated in their mailboxes over time. In this case though, SnapChat *CANT* do that - by definition - messages aren't supposed to lie around, they vanish when they are read. So the inability to deliver targeted ads is a fundamental shortcoming of the service.
It's amazing how they're trying to market it like they're doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. That's just... creepy.
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Key word is: supposed to.
Yes we all know it would be trivial to store every bit of data that goes through that service. There's no end-to-end encryption mechanism that I'm aware of or anything else that would prevent them from logging everything.
But there service is still predicated on their insistence that they don't. To sell advertising (especially if they sell it as targetted advertising) or to show targeted advertising to users (hey, I talked about dildo swings the other day, and here's an ad for one, w
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* key words are
* their
hey .. I just got up!
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Wait a minute. I want to hear more about dildo swings.
I'm starting to realize that I have lived a sheltered life.
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well, they don't even need to do that. they could also tag your account with a variety of advertising keywords based on the messages/images you send and receive, and toss the archive.
"fun" (Score:5, Funny)
How did I miss this halcyon era when Internet ads were "fun and informative"?
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There actually was a time, when sites hosted their own ads, and advertisers payed a flat rate! You'd see the same ad over and over again, sitting their in the corner.
If it was interesting or confusing, eventually you'd break down and _have_ to click it to find out what the hell they were even trying to sell. At the very least if it was interesting it stuck in your head.
I actually think this was far more effective than all this targeted advertising we've got now.
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* sitting there
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I actually think this was far more effective than all this targeted advertising we've got now.
Exactly. Sure, companies like Google have made a few hundred billion dollars with targeted ads, but, hey, what do they know?
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Effective as advertising, not effective at generating profit.
I get that there's a reason generic "targeted" advertising took over. Arranging rental of ad space on a website was a pain for both parties and a much higher bar for entry than copy+pasting some code. This combined with the ongoing death of the topic specific website ensure the days of a website owner hand picking advertisements they think their audience might go for are probably not coming back.
As far as the advertisements actually generating eff
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Companies like google are succeeding on pure scale.
Thanks for explaining why those billionaires are so dumb.
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How does that in any way imply they are dumb...
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Nobody said it wasn't way more efficient for the ad companies. The claim was that it was more efficient for the company advertising.
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How did I miss this halcyon era when Internet ads were "fun and informative"?
The rentals section of Craigslist and their jobs offered section are actually useful and informative for the users (although admittedly, I don't think those sections are considered "fun" unless you include the free sections of Craigslist) . Those two sections, rentals and jobs, require money to post each listing. If those paid sections didn't have such a barrier to entry, then they would be swamped with spam and duplicate posts, even more spam and duplicate posts than other sections on Craigslist already ha
Bleh (Score:4, Interesting)
Handful of friends and I use snapchat mainly to send stupid shit to each other. It's kinda fun, but none of us are really using it to chat or anything.
I might have considered paying a buck or two for the app (we've had some fun with it), but deal with ads, fuck that shit. The stupid random "live from Oktoberfest" shit that's been showing up lately is annoying enough.
I always wondered how they intended to fund/make money from this. I was kinda hoping for something more creative than "once it's popular, we'll show ads!".
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The company either makes money by charging users or showing ads. Would "charge for the service once it gets popular" a good alternative? What is your idea?
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I have no idea, but I'm not a creative person!
I tend to lean towards the "pro version" model of funding as long as the free version isn't totally crippled and they don't start moving free functionality to the pro version. Come up with some neat but not essential extras (I'd probably pay money to be able to group contacts together and send snaps to "everyone in group 'work friends'") and there's probably plenty of people like me who's buy it.
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I hear that about games too, but in every game I play the F2P players are constantly bitching that things that cost (oh, those horrible microtransactions), "should" be free. It never ends and I don't think it would here either.
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I would just like to point out that we've had Internet relay Chat [wikipedia.org] for 26 years, and it's still free to use with no ads. I guess it helps that it wasn't invented by a company.
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IRC is funded by donations of server resources and admin time. Snatchat pays for their servers.
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No, but I haven't had all the sense of whimsy ground out of me yet.
10B$ valuation (Score:3)
Well on the way to monetize eh? Go get those eyeballs. I heard they have 35 employees. Thats an amazing ratio, 10B for 35. GPRO a week or so ago was 11B for 350. BRCM is 21B for 11300. Makes you wonder...
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Tech is in a bubble no different than the late 90's. It will pop just the same.
Frog (Score:1)
It is like boiling a frog. Intrusive ads might drive users away onto a competing platform, and since there isn't anything much to the technology they need to preserve their user base. At the same time they have to monetize. This intermediate solution is to slowly ramp up revenue, we'll get to the creepy targeted ads sooner rather than later...
People have heard this before ... (Score:2)
they're trying to ease them in gently
Adblock or adaway to the rescue! (Score:4, Informative)
I just don't understand how people that are a little bit tech savvy cope with ads. The first things I do on a new computer (mine or a relative/friend)is:
- install Adblock Plus [adblockplus.org] on all the browsers that support it;
- tweak the host file to block [mvps.org] know ads/malware domains
I haven't seen an ad in years, the web feels so quiet when you browse like that, without popups, flashes, animations, everyone crying for your attention...
Android? Rooted smartphone/tablet? No problem! Here is AdAway [f-droid.org], basically tweaking the hosts file on the Android Linux, the same way that you do on a Windows PC.
Apple still eludes me, as my only iOS device, an iPad2 is not jailbroken, so I don't really know what's out there for it, so I still see lots of ads when browsing with it... Maybe that's the reason it's the device I do the least browsing with..
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AdAway for Android helps but you still see lots of ads, e.g. on YouTube. You can't block that sort of stuff with the hosts file as it is served from the same domains as the normal content.
Regretting their pride now (Score:5, Insightful)
The Snapchat team are really regretting that they were too prideful to take a $3B buyout. Now they get to enjoy the quick, flaming descent into being penniless refugees from a failed startup.
Ads can be ignored (Score:2)
Wait... ads can be ignored? When did this happen?!
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It's pure klunky bullshit and unoriginal brute force and it's always outdated.
Go with elegance ... go with Adblock.
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A hosts file ain't no firewall...
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Your spam actually wok against you.
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I field questions about using the hosts file service and use this post as justification to say, "No."
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Yeah, I've posted to the wrong article, too.