I Had A Random Thought...

[Griddlelol]

I dislike subscriptions. I love the idea, and there are many things I'd like to subscribe to, or would if there was the option, but I lost track of that stuff so fast. I had to force myself to only ever have one or two at a time. Currently it's Netflix and PS+. I'm not dropping netflix any time soon, and PS+ is fantastic value for me. Any more and I'd get my monthly pay cheque and wonder where it's all gone.

[dibs]

THe only ads that infuriate me are when you are listening to a long work on youtube and there is interstitial ads. Oh god.

[Patrick R]

The worst way ads affect my life is when I want to show my partner a video on YouTube and set it up like "This is the song that plays on loop in my head." and instead of the song I wanted playing

 

I feel like once a month there is a YouTube ad that appears and torments me endlessly.

 but I had a whole day where all I saw before

and I wanted to pull my eyes out.

 

I think about the actors who had to be in that Tim & Eric Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial and it's actually really upsetting.

 

But yeah, don't ad block.

[syntheticgerbil]

I'm not sure that's right. I listened to that show and they talked about people complaining when they started charging for their previously free podcast.

Ah okay, I guess it was the switchover from The Guardian to iTunes and then they charged.

 

I think the ads that bug me on Youtube is when I'm accidentally on someone's playlist or in a long video and it plays one of those 5 minute ads where you are expected to press skip after 30 seconds, except I'm busy doing something else and I don't want to find the tab to skip it.

[Ben X]

The video ads that I hate are on catch-up sites like ITV Player or whatever, where they have interactive ads, but instead of it being a clever use of the technology where you can click to purchase the item or whatever, they try to involve you in the story by having the advert on freeze for ten seconds while you choose which character you want to watch or whatever. Leave it to ad execs to use new technology in the most banal, irritating way possible.

[Mawd]

I ahh kinda hate twitch ads with a passion. But that's mostly because I generally only see one or two different ads for maybe a week or two and they all tend to be really macho boy focused. Like I don't need to see that edgy Mafia 3 ad a million times or I don't need to see some advert where a nondescript white gamer guy walks through a parade of military shooter dudes and a bunch of cosplayers who look like they walked straight out of Harajaku to sit down and stare creepily at a computer safe in the knowledge that Gigabyte or whoever supplied his motherboard.

Erh I dunno. I've turned off adblock on the usual media outlets I frequent and this discussion is reminding me to update that whitelist. But I guess I just dislike that add targeting isn't perfect (hah) so I either end up with adverts for Mitre Ten Mega (basically Home Depot), or really gross overly 'gamer' targeted ads for 'big boys and their toys'. I don't know; maybe I should be okay with it. Not all ads are terrible. Maybe just the ones I see lately?\

 

Oh and I found a link to

 I don't care about The Living Channel at all but I think that series of ads was really well done.

[Twig]

Let me ask this: how do you guys feel about the Idle Thumbs podcast ads?  If there was a blocker for that, would you use it?

They make the ads entertaining, at least!

 

Also see I hate video ads more than anything else. This is also why I don't watch, like TV.

 

Anything, ANYTHING that interrupts my video is moderately likely to just make me stop watching the video or stream altogether.

[Ben X]

I wouldn't use an adblocker for the Thumbs adverts because they're not skeevy (plus although I wouldn't block them for being irritating, they are actually entertaining and easy to listen to).

[tberton]

A blocker for podcast ads wouldn't even make sense. You can always skip past the ads anyway. And, unless I'm mistake, revenue from those ads is based on how many people use the code, not how many people listen to the ad, so a blocker would only indirectly hurt revenue.

[undermind9]

Banner & side bar ad's arent a problem - seen them for 20yrs now, but the full screen take-over ones are obnoxious, especially on mobile. Additionally the cached creepy ones are no good - Like now every website i go to i see my recent amazon searches or Casper & Worby Parker spots everywhere

 

There was a recent discussion on the Back2Work podcast with Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann about advertising in web & recent iOS update with some built in blocking.  They address the pod-cast ad's, page views, etc. - being someone who has no web content or anything to do with the behind the scenes it was pretty interesting - http://5by5.tv/b2w/239

[Zeusthecat]

After thinking about this a bit more and seeing some of the responses here, I think I should soften by stance a bit.

 

The root of my frustrations with this ad business is how it has slowly morphed from easily ignored banner ads and sidebar ads to this nonsense we have now where you go to a site and before you can even start reading anything a stupid video player takes over your screen to tell you about how you should refuel with Mt. Dew, another video is autoplaying with really loud audio somewhere further down the page about life insurance, and then another ad is just stuck to your screen and stutters around, always staying in view while you try to scroll down the page. It is obnoxious and the few sites that I do frequent on the internet are really bad with that shit (I'm so tired of hearing about NOS every time I click a Polygon article). I kind of feel like if a lot of these websites are going to disrespect their audience with such obtrusive bullshit, then I am morally within my right to circumvent that. Given that I only frequent about 4 websites (I really only use the internet for video game news and coming here) and all of those (with the exception of this site) are pretty egregious with the way they implement advertising, I just have adblock blocking everything.

 

However, going off of what Ben mentioned, if there is a way to configure adblock to only let certain types of ads through, I think I could get behind that as there are certainly types of ads that don't bother me at all and I wouldn't mind leaving them be. I'll look into that more now that I know that is actually possible.

 

As far as podcast ads go, I am totally cool with those and in some cases I actually kind of like them. That is classy and respectful advertising (at least the way the thumbs handle it). They actually use the products, screen what they are willing to advertise to their audience ahead of time, and make it perfectly clear that if you go try out that product using a discount code it will go towards funding more Idle Thumbs content. That is advertising at its best. If websites could adopt something similar, or maybe even just give users the option when they first browse to the site to specify how much advertising they are willing to put up with, while making it clear how that goes towards funding more content on the site, I would totally get behind that too.

 

Also, I might be able to get behind subscriptions for certain websites. Especially if it cut down on the types 'clickbait' of articles that websites tend to post so they can generate max views for max revenue.

[Dewar]

The worst way ads affect my life is when I want to show my partner a video on YouTube and set it up like "This is the song that plays on loop in my head." and instead of the song I wanted playing

 

I feel like once a month there is a YouTube ad that appears and torments me endlessly.

 but I had a whole day where all I saw before

and I wanted to pull my eyes out.

 

I think about the actors who had to be in that Tim & Eric Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial and it's actually really upsetting.

 

But yeah, don't ad block.

 

Well, you can subscribe to YouTube now to remove the ads. I plan on trying it, but I wonder if it will effect the creators positively or negatively.

[dibs]

WOw, youtube red is a great name. They should have just made it redtube though.

 

 

Honestly, i use yt enough that i would consider it. Not available in Ireland yet though!

[jennegatron]

I am a donor for Maximum Fun which I think is a really great way to support the 3 shows on the network that I listen to (Judge John Hodgman, My Brother My Brother & Me, and The Adventure Zone). I'll probably up my contribution come pledge drive season in the spring to $10 a month now that I make more than I did last time around. They are still ad supported, but I feel good about pitching in $5 each month, especially since that was magnified by a bunch of match donors that contribute more for each new & upgrading donor that signs up during the pledge drive, which I did in the 2015 drive. They also do a good job, during the pledge drive, to not try and shame listeners into contributing more than they can afford, and encourage people to contribute enough to get cool rewards.

You also get to select the shows you listen to so the money actually goes to the people you like, with some going to the organization Max Fun for all the operational & hosting costs, as well as the cost of developing new shows.

[Bjorn]

I pay for the Savage Lovecast, which comes down to I think a bit less than a dollar a show.  The paid version is longer and has no ads.  There's a couple of other podcasts I've be willing to pay for (or have contributed donations to if they support that). 

 

I also increasingly think that I would be willing to pay someone to be a music curator for me.  Like if an individual charged a bunch of people like $5 a month and made a variety of curated music lists, I think I would totally try that.  I'm just terrible about finding new music that I like, so I listen to the same stuff over and over (and all the algorithmic based suggestions do a terrible job of deciding what I like). 

[Cleinhun]

The thing that most bothers me about internet advertisements is the way that they've made websites slower. it feels like the faster the average connections speed gets the more unnecessary garbage every website tries to pack in to every page load. It's so rare to find a website that only loads the things I care about instead of one thing I care about and 7 things I will never click on that all have their own fame or run their own scripts or whatever.

[Mangela Lansbury]

The thing that bothers me most about internet advertisements is that they're a common way for malware to get on computers. Secure your ad networks and I'll turn off my ad blocker!

 

ALSO INTERSTITIALS WITH LAG ARE THE WORST, I DIDN'T WANT TO CLICK YOUR AD I WAS TRYING TO CLICK A LINK WHY DID THE INTERSTITIAL TAKE 15 SECONDS TO BECOME ACTIVE (this is the real reason I originally downloaded an ad blocker)

[SecretAsianMan]

A blocker for podcast ads wouldn't even make sense. You can always skip past the ads anyway. And, unless I'm mistake, revenue from those ads is based on how many people use the code, not how many people listen to the ad, so a blocker would only indirectly hurt revenue.

 

My reason for posing that question wasn't to actually suggest that a podcast ad blocker is a good idea.  I wanted to see the motivation behind disliking ads. 

 

I get that people find them annoying but saying that one set of ads is ok because you like the hosts seems pretty disingenuous to me.  I can get behind what Zeus is saying about the Thumbs actually endorsing products they've used and believe are good.  I think that's a way better sell than simply a check.  I've even used a Thumbs (and Bombcast) promo code for those reasons*.  But I can't get behind any sort of moral high ground.  It feels too much like illegally downloading a song or game because I don't feel like paying for it, except in this case the payment literally costs me nothing and does take away from the content creator.

 

The one exception to this case that really bothered the hell out of me was Hulu Plus.  I used my Chromecast to try their premium service for 3 months.  IT STILL HAS ADS.  A subscription model that still stops you every 10 minutes to run an unskippable 30 second ad.  I didn't even make it a month before cancelling.

 

*Casper mattresses actually are pretty good.  I'd call them slightly softer rather than firm but still good support and comfy.

[jennegatron]

seconded on the casper mattress. we have one and I like it. I'm not particularly sensitive to sleeping surface though, so if you are, ymmv. i also very much like nature box!

 

(hulu has added a second tier of paid subscription that puts ads only at the beginning and end, never in the middle, but it's still not ideal)

[Mawd]

I think what I like about The Idle Thumbs, Snap Judgement, Giant Bomb and The Adventure Zone's ads is that they actually deliver them infused with their own personality. Even if there isn't always a tonne of variation from the script they still seem to make the delivery fun.

I got to listen to two podcasts deliver the same Chipotle adspot recently and the difference was night and day. One person just sounded like they were reading a complete press release of how great Chipotle is and it just sounded mechanical. The other presented the adspot in their own words and delivered it in a much more lifelike enjoyable way.

In a universe where podcasters have to deliver adspots every episode for the same sponsors what lets me enjoy and appreciate the amount of tedium this could be for the casters is the work they put into making yet another naturebox or meundies adspot feel fun and that's what stops me from skipping (actually the ads I've heard on these casts were always so painless that skipping never entered my mind but shh).

It's like how there's a college radio station in NZ called Bfm that has a huge listenership outside of college and one of the fun things about them is that they script and deliver their own advertisements for their sponsors and it just feels like more funny show content.

[Patrick R]

Well, you can subscribe to YouTube now to remove the ads. I plan on trying it, but I wonder if it will effect the creators positively or negatively.

This changes everything.

If I had any money at all I'd do this.

[Cleinhun]

(hulu has added a second tier of paid subscription that puts ads only at the beginning and end, never in the middle, but it's still not ideal)

Actually it removes ads entirely from everything except for 6 specific shows

 

Due to streaming rights, the shows below are not included in our No Commercials plan. You can still watch these shows interruption-free. They will play with a short commercial before and after each episode. The shows are: Grey’s Anatomy, Once Upon A Time, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Scandal, New Girl, Grimm and How To Get Away With Murder.

[jennegatron]

Well there you go!

[syntheticgerbil]

I am a donor for Maximum Fun which I think is a really great way to support the 3 shows on the network that I listen to (Judge John Hodgman, My Brother My Brother & Me, and The Adventure Zone). I'll probably up my contribution come pledge drive season in the spring to $10 a month now that I make more than I did last time around. They are still ad supported, but I feel good about pitching in $5 each month, especially since that was magnified by a bunch of match donors that contribute more for each new & upgrading donor that signs up during the pledge drive, which I did in the 2015 drive. They also do a good job, during the pledge drive, to not try and shame listeners into contributing more than they can afford, and encourage people to contribute enough to get cool rewards.

That's the funny thing, I love when they can riff on the ads on a podcast. It can get pretty interesting when people just sort of go off rails. That said I am kind of sick of the same 3-4 companies doing podcast ads. At this point I sort of don't want to hear anyone talk about Nature Box ever again.

 

There's something to be said for the entertainment value of an ad though. It's been with whatever media since the dawn of radio. I like a lot of ads if they are funny, well directed, or have cool animation. I miss a lot of the character animation ads of the 80s. It just sucks when the same ones repeat over and over, like when Hulu decides it has about 3 on rotation. Or Polygon just has one terrible lispy NOS ad for like 7 fucking months.

[eot]

The worst ads were the ones on CO-OP, the follow up to the 1UP show. They desperately needed a professional narrator for those. and maybe even a real actor.