20
votes
I would be fine if ads were implemented to help fund Tildes
What are people's thoughts on ads? I feel that if they are implemented in the right way they can be very unobtrusive and not take away from the viewing experience. If they can help fund the project down the road I would personally not be against them.
This had been a trend lately over the internet.
This is a really important part to recognize. Even if you start out with ads that are unobtrusive, non-tracking, etc., it gives the advertisers leverage to make you change your model.
Say that eventually you have a pretty big advertiser spending $50,000 a year on your site. One day they come to you and say, "hey, our marketing people are saying that it would be way more effective for us to spend this money advertising on sites with detailed targeting. Most other sites offer it, so if we can't get something comparable here, we're going to leave." Now you might have to make a choice between firing an employee or just adding some tracking/targeting capability. A little bit of tracking isn't so bad, right? It would be way worse to have to fire someone. The users will understand.
I wonder if it's possible to diversify ads enough or limit funding percentage by ads in order to create a "buffer" to prevent this leverage in the first place.
Sure, it's theoretically possible, but in the end it's just adding a lot of difficulty to try and push back against the fundamental fact that advertisers' interests don't line up with users' at all, and are often in direct conflict. In the end, the people that are paying for the site are the ones with the power, and their interests will be the ones treated as the most important.
I think this is also what makes it so difficult, currently, to set up a more ethical model. You can not personally afford to give Tildes 100% of your time as it stands, if you had had the opportunity to raise money you could have, but if you raised money you would be beholden to whoever gave you that in the first place.
I think this may even be true for crowdfunding to an extent, but instead of being dependent on what's good for advertisers you're dependent on the wiles of people who support you, and who might recant support if they either are unable or unwilling to continue to provide it.
It's still a risk with crowdfunding, and the crowd can certainly be fickle, but I think it's fundamentally different to advertising. At least when crowdfunding, the interests of the users and the funders are inherently aligned because they're the same people.
What if Tildes were to create its own ad service, guaranteeing that the ads were unobtrusive and non-tracking, making that the main point of the service, and then sell that service to other websites?
People have tried that, they've all failed as far as I know. Project Wonderful was a significant example that supplied non-intrusive, ethical advertising to a lot of popular webcomics as well as other sites. It had to shut down last year, here's an archived version of their explanation: https://web.archive.org/web/20180801054610/projectwonderful.com/thanks.php
Either way, it wouldn't be something I'm interested in working on at all anyway, but I don't think it's a feasible service any more regardless.
That's a shame about Project Wonderful.
5. People notice the decline in quality.
6. A new platform appears without the ads.
7. Everyone deserts your platform.
8. Repeat from step 1.
That's only the ideal world. See: reddit, which has no real competitor still, in spite of going to shit in many different ways.
The vicious circle of the commercial internet talk platforms.
Couldn't have said it better. But really any kind of monetization upon which a site relies has the potential to become it's albatross in this way, the risk remains that what is good for the site (i.e. what generates revenue) and what's good for the user no longer align at some point.
Firstly, there are two (or 3, depending on who you ask) types of ad supported marketing you can do.
The classic form of advertizing is the one used by print publications. In these cases, the ads a type of sponsored content and the audience your site cultivates encourages advertizers to buy in. The textbook example of this "classic" model would be something like Vogue or GQ. The magazines cultivate an audience or readership, almost a sort of communtiy. Advertisers want to reach that audience and produce content that appeals to them, showing their product or service or whatever in a favorable light, and fund the magazine that way. This has advantages and disadvantages.
The other form is the Google and Facebook model, which we'll call the "ad-tech" form. We all know what this is so I don't need to review it. But The key considerations here is that the ads being served up are indifferent to the content you are producing.
The second form is right out for a site like Tildes. It's responsible for much about what is shitty about the modern internet. The first form could arguably have a place. Like, it would probably be fine to let Canon or Nikon include an ad on a ~ page dedicated to cameras and photography. Normally the downside is you don't want your site's voice to be biased by concern over whether Nikon will keep signing the checks, but since this is a freewheeling discussion group rather than a content site with a specific editorial voice so bias isn't a huge issue (as long as the moderation remains fair and impartial).
But, like I said, maintaining that as a revenue stream means having people on hand to do advertiser relations and enforce editorial standards for the site. That's probably not the best use of a resources for a discussion forum, though I can see it being useful for a dedicated news blog. This is, basically, how the ad market for Podcasting works.
You could also have a sort of hybrid model where you can maintain a patron tier and a free-tier that has ads. Or, alternatively, you could have a default site with ads, but if you clear a certain donation threshold each month the ads go away for everyone, so it's kind of a hostage situation.
Yea, the distinction between 'ads' and 'adtech' is important and one that I never really understood until I saw this post by Doc Searl, who also has an excellent blog series discussing adtech and its intrusiveness.
As far as I can recall, nobody has even attempted to do traditional 'ads' on the internet; it's completely unthinkable to even try something that doesn't come bundled with a hundred different forms of tracking and analytics.
It is done, but it's usually more of a principled stand since the ad tech model takes less work from the content producer.
This is the model for Podcasts, like I mentioned, as well as "sponsor" based video content and twitch streamers.
Even if we stick to just textual media, some of the older blogs, like Daring Fireball use this model. He has one non-obtrusive ad in the corner of the page that he sells, and he has a weekly sponsor of his RSS feed wherein he publishes a sponsor post to his RSS feed plugging his sponsors.
Also, I would classify Amazon's affiliate marketing program as a version of this (although you could probably argue it deserves its own category). That's where you can have a special affiliate link with Amazon and anyone who clicks into amazon through that link to buy a product gets you a kickback. A lot of product review sites, like pre-NYTimes merger Wirecutter, used to rely on the affiliate program as a source of revenue. They would link all their recommended products on Amazon.
Ads go against the whole concept of tildes. You'll notice in the footer of every page:
Tildes is exclusively funded by the donations of generous people, and those people get no perks from donating. That gives the purest experience–everyone is treated equally, we don't have to worry about the whole "advertiser-friendly" controversy. We're self-sufficient.
Tildes can be what Tildes needs to be without advertising. No one person or company gets a say in it (save for @Deimos), and that's how it always should be.
Do it!
I've already voted on some comments here, but I figured I should make my opinion visible.
No ads. No way.
As other people have already pointed out, taking money from advertisers means that those advertisers have influence over the site.
If people want to see Tildes thrive, it's not hard to make a Patreon donation.
You don't have to donate some extravagant amount of money. There are over 8,000 people of Tildes, even at this early stage. If everyone donated $1 (Canadian) per month, that would add up to nearly $100,000 income every year for Tildes. Even if we all donated 50c (Canadian) per month, that would add up to nearly $50,000 income per year. I suspect that would allow @Deimos to continue to focus on this website full-time without having to get a job. And that's based on only the current membership. Imagine when this site grows to 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 subscribers. Even though the costs of running the site would increase, the donation amount required per member would still fall.
Of course not everyone can afford even 50c per month. But I expect many of us can. Some of us can even afford more.
A droplet may be small, but a lot of drops make an ocean.
We don't need to sell this site to advertisers. We can "own" it ourselves.
(In case anyone wonders... I have put my money where my mouth is. I am making a regular monthly donation to Tildes. I'm not asking anyone to do something I haven't already done myself.)
I will block every ad that tildes or any other site on the internet attempts to serve. I consent to render your HTML, CSS, and images, but third party JavaScript is malware and I won't run it.
It works both ways. If I'm a website operator who's bleeding money and can't afford to maintain a web presence because my site is not profitable—in terms of both money & time—then I may refuse to consent to serve you my site under some circumstances.
Not all implementations of internet ads are evil—and absolutist remarks like yours don't solve many problems. Just playing devils advocate.
(Yes, I do personally use an adblocker).
I agree! That's where my remark of discouraging absolutism comes in. A lot of ads are indeed scourges. But not all are.
Daring Fireball for example implements a single, small, image-based advert that's served as a first-party; with no third party ad analytics whatsoever. There's nuance to every conversation and stupid statements to the effect of "I will block every ad" are unhelpful at best & encourage chilling effects at their worst.
True, but that’s general analytics. Not something the advertiser is receiving.
That's your prerogative. Frankly, I don't care if your site goes away or not, and the same goes for every news and social site on the internet. If the web reverted to its post dot-com-bust state circa 2001 I strongly suspect the entire world would be better off.
I'd like to hear from @Deimos how things are looking financially since it's sort of implied by OP that Tildes needs ad revenue.
The overall state hasn't changed significantly since the information I posted a few months ago. The numbers are out of date now (it's been several more months, so I've received the regular Patreon donations, and other one-time ones have come in as well), but the general state is about the same and the costs haven't increased or anything (and I expected it to stay about the same until we're publicly visible). I'll quote the post here for easier reading:
How much runway do you have until you start having to make tough decisions?
It sounds to me like Tildes in it's current form (with no further dev) is sustainable in the long term with the patreon donations and that's really cool. I realize of course that the shared desire is for development to continue...
EDIT: Also, thanks for pointing to that thread and giving an update. Much appreciated!
Well, I wouldn't call any of the decisions "tough", nothing's in danger at all.
My plan is to finish getting the site publicly visible inside the next week or two, and then after that I'll be applying for a couple of grants. If either the public visibility results in a bunch of new donations or any of the grant applications are successful quickly, then that's great, and I can just keep focusing on Tildes. If not, I'm going to be looking around a bit for some contracting/part-time work to have some regular income, but hopefully should still be able to spend a good amount of time on the site. Either way I'm not very worried about anything, and don't want to rush it.
How would you feel about a small, non-obtrusive banner that appears once after you use the site for a month?
It'd be color-matched to the theme, and just be a little banner saying "Hey, we're a nonprofit that is fully funded by donations, if you like what you see, please consider donating."
No bright yellow, no screaming full page popovers, just a one-time banner after using the site for a month with a large dismiss link. After dismissing it, it should hide for several months, if not more.
I feel like a lot of people here don't know about the option to donate, and many more would donate if they knew about the option.
Yeah, I definitely think there should be something to make it more prominent. Maybe even something like a small "progress meter" somewhere visible that could show the current donation level compared to where it would be good to be.
Awesome to hear!
Also curious. The site itself seems so light weight that it's amazing. I'd be very interested in how expensive it is, resource wise etc, per user on average. I love stats like that.
I can't really break it down that easily right now because the server is so under-utilized that I have no solid idea how much more it can support. I'm spending about $100 USD/month on the server right now, but I suspect it could easily support at least 100x more traffic/activity than the site currently has. Almost all of the server's resources are still free—the average load over the last week is 0.03, which means that generally one of the CPU cores is only 3% utilized, and it has multiple. I can't imagine server resources being a problem or significant expense for a very, very long time.
What drew me to tildes was the sense that it has such a strong point of view on how internet discussion should be cultivated, backed by unwavering values like not implementing advertising. I respect the intention of your idea, but it's too big of a slippery slope.
I’m staunchly opposed to ads (and they will never happen on tildes as long as Deimos is in charge anyway).
That said I’m really curious about other revenue models. I’m curious about a system where, for example, the site will go down for 2 days if it doesn’t get the contributions it needs to stay afloat long term. Or other models.
I think driving home that websites need money to exist is a key and hard shift for our society, but it’s the only way out of the ads spiral we are in right now.
I agree they're some interesting points being made here and it's always good to discuss things but I can't believe this is already a talking point? NO! This goes against everything Tildes stand for and I'm quite honestly a bit shocked that people just forget what kind of slippery slope this is every single time.
I am 100% against ads, no matter the kind. What I would suggest, and I don't know if this has been suggested yet, is to add a "Mounthly goal" with the amount received and the amount needed, clearly visible in the frontpage (reddit used to do this).
Those who donate could have a little icon by their name. A site that does this is https://lichess.org and it has tremendous success. It is free and open-source, no ads and the only difference between donators and non-donators is an icon by their name.
If Deimos would have to either shut the site down or introduce ads I would be fine with ads. Otherwise no, never
I'd be fine with Tildes introducing ads. I would continue to use an adblocker myself, though.
Maybe have a category called sponsors or promotions where companies can do what they do all over reddit but only on that section of tildes. Ads as the idea of having a portion of your site that is not controlled by you so that any shit content can just run on your user's browsers is an awful concept.
Tildes is not affiliated with Reddit in any way, despite being created by a former employee of Reddit. How would this three-way agreement between a sponsor and Reddit and Tildes operate?
Maybe a different reading here, but he may be suggesting tildes offer a dedicated sponsored group, as opposed to how reddit allows sponsored content on every subreddit.
I wonder if there is some sort of reddit gold clone we could do? Even if it's just giving a little badge on the profiles of people who are patrons or something.
I'd prefer if tildes would stay ad free
Having a donation method or subscription however would interests me, nothing that you /need/ to have but something that can give a nice feeling of helping to maintain the website.
There is a donation method. Tildes' Patreon page is mentioned a few times in this very thread - here, here, and here - with a couple of those comments containing links to that Patreon page.