Is there a word for things that are both hilarious and tragic? I laughed out loud multiple times. Kudos to the author for making such a depressing topic so hysterical.
Tragicomic is used often in Swedish (Tragikomiskt). There is a nuance difference between tragicomic and bittersweet. Bittersweet is when you daughter moves out to her own place,it's sad that your kid grew up but also great, it's bittersweet but not tragicomic. Tragicomic is when something is so screwed up that the only thing you can do is laugh at it.
Right. Bittersweet is about something that affects you personally, some experience that blends joy and sadness. Tragicomic is about some external going-on that you observe and react to like an audience member.
There's also the laugh-cry emoji, which can be used for both situations, I think.
“a link to what the site looked like last week, before Google made me make it worse on purpose to make money.”
Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter.
They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.
That was the author's point, but I think it is undermined by the fact that the ads on the page are more obnoxious than the AI-generated content. The AI generated content is nicely hidden away underneath the huge banner ad and the full screen popup ad that the author wanted to include.
I ran into this as well about 2 years ago. I thought it’d be cool to create a site that’d algorithmically estimate the snowpack for mountains based on observations and elevation. It was a very rough estimate, but still better than using 1 square mile observations, which obviously could vary by 10k+ feet of elevation.
When I tried putting a few Google Ads on it to pay the hosting costs, it rejected it until I added long-form descriptions of the content. So instead of a useful chart and table, I ended up having long-winded descriptions of the location, algorithm, search, elevation’s effect on snowpack, and all that.
It was so fucking stupid I just up and deleted the whole project and never looked back. I’m sure I could have made the tool better and charged a subscription or something if it was actually useful, but it just kind of made me jaded on the modern web. I gave up and went hiking.
I wonder if you could DIY your own ads via an amazon affiliate account. I've used one in the past for actual product reviews, but now I'm wondering if you could hack it in in some way.
Ah so this is why recipe websites are straight out of some demonic fever dream where you have to scroll 1 mile past 30 blocks of text, video, ads to get to the ingredients, then 1 mile further to get to the instructions.
All of those sites should be banned - but now i see it's Google encouraging them - such an extreme downgrade in usability from a basic html site from 30 years ago.
Something has gone extremely wrong on a huge scale culturally and politically.
thanks for the interesting read, one amusing thing: I went to the site and "where is the adds?", then I remembered I'm using a add-hardened firefox to view it ;) Sure enough using safari showed me the horror. Serious question: why do we put up with this as readers?
I keep safari "unblocked" just for this kind of scenario, as sometimes the blocking breaks stuff I want to see that doesn't work otherwise. It's becoming rarer for sure over time. Didn't mean to impinge on safari, it's a great browser that I use for work.
Even Edge has ad blockers to an extent. The only browser that doesn't natively block trackers, or does stuff to reduce the power of adblockers is Chrome. Coincidentally, they are owned by the biggest ad network on earth.
I had to pull out the ol' ungoogled chromium browser for this and for a moment I thought it was still a joke because of how absurd some of the ads were. One of them was a picture of an empty toilet paper roll holding up a toilet seat with the title "Put a Toilet Paper Roll Under the Toilet Seat at Night, Here's Why", and clicking it took me to a site[1] with a bunch of nonsense life hacks probably written by some AI. Surprisingly, the site itself has no ads, yet it does link to a bunch of scam products.
I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?
It happened to me too, with my simple site for generating acrostic poems [0].
It would only show the poems create. I tried Adsense, was rejected for lack of content (probably, because they are mysterious about the reason they reject you). Then I tried adding lists of words starting with the letters used as initials for the acrostics. Rejected again.
Then I gave up, and decided to use affiliate links.
Maybe it's time for a market cap maximum. If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries, you get broken up. No more borg controlling the internet. This should help prevent vertical consolidation. Truly corporate death penalty any children of breakups who collude (full loss to equity, half loss to creditors, assets auction to public).
Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...
I wish there was a way to turn “I’m pretty sure this business is pulling some BS” into “Just shut them the fuck down already”. But that would probably require the Justice system to work.
Announcing GoogleSquared, it's an entity which is entitled to precisely half of Googles profit (or loss) in any year before stock buy backs and dividends. It will buy back exactly as many shares of stock as Google does every year, issue exactly as many stocks as Google does every year to exactly the same entities, and issue exactly the same dividends, and do nothing else.
Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock.
(perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)
When you set an arbitrary cap like "GDP of all African countries" lots of people will argue it's too high, or too low, and you won't have any argument to make because it's arbitrary.
Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.
I agree that the solution is unrealistical. But not for this reason: the "no limit" is also arbitrary and people do not agree if this is right. Moreover, lots of people do not agree with regulations and norms in society, but society creates these things and people learn to comply to live in society.
Isn't that true for many if not most laws? We don't not have taxes just because lots of people will argue they're too high or too low, we don't not have a criminal justice system because people will argue sentences are too harsh or too lenient.
Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).
I think it’d be more accurate to say “imprecise” rather than “arbitrary.” For example, the legal drinking age is set to 21 (or whatever) based on politicians’ estimation of when most people are mature enough to handle the consequences. It’s true that there is no way to exactly specify a perfect age limit, but that doesn’t mean the limit was set randomly without any reason or basis, i.e., arbitrarily. Sorry if I’m being too pedantic; it’s just one of those nights I suppose.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.
Corporations are necessary for specialisation, e.g. even knowing what your legal liability is, having someone to enforce health and safety rules, being able to run a production line rather than having one person spend about a year making a single car.
We can't get most of the interesting things we see in developed economies just by sole traders hiring someone directly for each thing without a corporate structure, partly because that too is a specialisation, and partly because that's way too fragile (every such thing either has a bus number of 1, or it's a mediocre reinvention of a corporation).
> I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Could be. There's a reason we don't see aliens in the sky.
A the same time the "miracle" of collective action that you want to get rid of — because everything corporations do wrong is also done by other kinds of co-operations — isn't really just corporations, it's everything that makes us primates.
That's why you need to be more precise than "just ban them all", why the simple and obvious solution is wrong.
That’s not what arbitrary means. The age is set as low as possible while still being reasonable as to not send kids to war. Maybe the distinction between the ages 16-17 and 17-18 seems “arbitrary” but there is a reason the age is 17 and not 71. Hence, not arbitrary.
If the value of "GDP of all African countries" is a numerical value then it is simplistic. If the value is informed by the functions which result in such numbers then it is perhaps too complicated.
If the parent has lots of experience with African economies then the value might be a distillation of the latter complicated ensemble of functions into something very meaningful.
That's why compromise happens. It's clearly superior to "let this company grow to an unlimited size, have all the power in the market, and tell customers to go pound sand because we're too big to fail". It would be a great start to set a cap or market percentage (assuming the market is huge, which obviously online marketing is).
I wish this preference applied to governments as well. No government should have dominion over more than either a a certain percentage of people nor a certain percentage of production capacity.
How has market cap got anything to do with monetizing the site?
You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?
Sure, I think we can agree that at Google scale the business interactions with me as a potential supplier are automated and soulless.
On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless.
Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rather that I have nothing of value to offer them.
I cannot tell you how much I despise this idea that a company can be too big to talk to their customers/partners/products.
If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?
In this situation it's not "google providing the site owner with value."
It's the site owner providing Google with value (that they want Google to pay for).
It's not incumbent for companies to interact with every person who thinks they _should_ be a supplier to said company. I get people cold calling me every day wanting to be my supplier. I absolutely ignore most of that.
In this case Google's algorithm did not ignore the potential supplier. It evaluated the site and sent a reply saying basically "thanks, but no thanks".
Now, I understand your gripe - an algorithm did this, not a human. But this has been the Google way since long before they were a fifth of this size. So it's not like a competitor changes Google's way of doing business.
And Google's way is not a secret. If you don't like it, then don't have a business relationship with them (as a supplier or customer.)
> Can you elaborate on what the value of the site might be, to say a competitive advertiser,
Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable.
But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page?
And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value being put to work. The old site has the same value, google just refused to recognize it.
> how that value might be unlocked?
Uhh, put ads on the site and the ads will get valuable views.
I don't know what you're asking here.
Or are you asking how competition between advertising networks would help? You wouldn't see several big networks in healthy competition all having the same bad requirements that a superpower can get away with.
I think that if you had 5 advertising networks, they'd all operate the same.
I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same.
You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertising aggregator, someone would be leveraging it (and that someone eould likely be Google.)
>I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view [...] You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table
What makes you say these things? Google isn't walking away from a deal here. They are simply imposing their own rules knowing that the publisher has very little choice but to comply. Google probably knows that the enshitified version of the site makes them more money, but that doesn't mean a cleaner site has no value. It's just not maximising advertising income at the cost of user experience.
If there were several ad networks competing for this kind of business then each of them would have less power to impose their rules. Their margins would be far lower. Advertisers would pay less and/or sites would be making more money. And sites might have a choice to prioritise user experience over maximising ad revenue.
But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on?
Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising.
Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving that value on the table? If so, why hasn't some other company taken advantage of this value?
The new unneeded content doesn't make the site more appealing to advertise on, instead it exists purely to satisfy arbitrary standards set by Adsense. I feel you've missed the point of the article
I get it. The unnecessary content games the Adsense algorithm, convincing it that the site now has value as a "place for adverts".
That, in itself, is not actually a win. There would need to be traffic, clicks on ads, and so on to be a win.
There's no evidence (either way, it's simply not mentioned) if the site actually makes any revenue from the ads that are now on it. Perhaps the automated Adsense algorithm was correct "the original site isn't a good ad site" - and the mistake is that it can't see what "seems" to be true to us, which is that the new site is no better.
A calculator sounds like a pretty good place to advertise actually. Any tool where a user spends a lot of time instead of rapidly scrolling through it could be decent ad space.
Sure, a calculator. But this isn't really a general purpose calculator. It's a simple question/answer of "number of votes in this district". How long honestly are you going to spend on a site like that? It sounds to me like a very long-tail question. (Admittedly, I've never even felt the urge to ask the question much less search for a web site to answer it.)
Having only one ad network means that the monopolist holds all the cards. They can extract huge margins from advertisers while passing on very little to websites. And they can make all the rules. Websites have to comply no questions asked. If the monopolist closes your account it may be the end of the road for your business.
That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook, Amazon and a couple of smaller ones like X and Microsoft. The problem is that the big ones appear to have cleanly divvied up the space without stepping on each others' toes much.
For instance, Amazon does compete with Google for advertisers' money, but it has very little effect on the choice a website like Apportionment Calculator has as they can't sell their site on Amazon.
Similarly, I'm not sure how much of a competition Facebook Audience Network actually is for AdSense. I think it's mostly interesting for sites that have a significant Facebook/Instagram presence. Again, not much of a choice for small web apps like Apportionment Calculator.
>The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy".
No, that was not the complaint. The complaint is that Google demanded changes that made the site worse for users. These changes are clearly meant to optimise ad revenue.
Google is in a position of power that allows them to make these demands. More competition between ad networks would reduce the power of each individual ad network and give publishers more negotiating power.
>As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
As I understand it, no other ad networks have even seen the site. Amazon and Facebook are clearly unsuitable. Microsoft may have been worth a shot. For this type of site I think Google has a nearly complete monopoly.
Their point is that if there were more ad companies then the chance they would have allowed the site to go up as the original. Not to 100% of course but drastically higher than 0%
The point is that if google ads were busted up into more corporations it would be more competitive and there would be other ad companies that would offer superior options.
What you're saying is heresy in a capitalist world.
It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue.
I don't think market cap is the right signal, but vertical integration. The worst monopolistic behaviour almost always involves one company controlling multiple parts of a supply chain. That's obviously why vertical integration is so popular!
This was something that was always seen as inspiration in Apple, while they were small. Once a company of that nature gets to a certain size, it becomes far to powerful as any movement in the core business, intentional or otherwise, can influence multiple industries simultaneously.
This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.
Yeah, so I think that the issue isn't that Apple does several things well, it's that they do something well and then only consume that product themselves.
To an extent every business must generalise and specialise in various configurations as they get going and differentiate themselves, but at the point where Apple is building its own silicon which it then puts in its own hardware on which you can install software from their app store, regulators should be able to clearly say "if you're going to make chips, you have to let other people buy them too" and "if you're going to have an app store you have to let other people have an app store too" and so on.
That's not feasible for a very small business, but it's not as if you can apply a "market cap" point at which it becomes feasible. You can however pretty easily tell when a company has a "wholesale" division and a "retail" division and is essentially selling to themselves in the same way as another company might sell to them. It's always challenging codifying that stuff into law but we have a pretty long history of doing so, I don't think it would be an insurmountable regulatory challenge.
That and acquisition of a direct competitor who has beat a larger company. If you lose a competition, you should fall behind. Losing a competition and then forking out cash to make the leader switch teams before he crosses the finish line is a complete perversion of the game
Nvidia is a great example of why a flat rule like this wouldn't work. Nvidia pretty much just does one, pretty specialized thing (GPUs) and trying to break it up into >10 pieces worth <$20B each (approximate median GDP of African nations by IMF) would be completely unnecessary. Just their gaming GPUs had ~$6B in profit in just the last year alone, and we know that their market cap comes much more from the AI market. We definitely could use stronger anti-monopoly laws, but market cap limits aren't the way to do it.
> If your market cap exceeds the median GDP of all African countries
What does this mean?
In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion.
Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP.
The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today.
Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then?
(I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)
I assume he picked some ridiculously high number as a starting point.
In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies.
That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.
So, I'm generally aware how monopolies form but given I'm not a web developer, what are the difficulties in starting a competing ad revenue company in the world today beyond the typical difficulties facing starting companies/startups?
If what you make is an ad platform, you have the normal chicken egg problem that without your ad network existing on many pages, no one wants to buy ads from you, and opposite way that without lots of ad buyers no one wants to reserve room for your ad network on their site.
But that's a normal startup problem. What makes it impossibility to beat google is that they control so many other parts:
- they know everything about the visitor. What they've searched for on google, which videoes they watch on YouTube, which websites you visit through their ads or browser, where you normally shop through Maps, who you keep in contact with through Gmail, which apps you use on your Android. Etc. Etc. There is no way you can place more relevant ads than them.
Secondly, if someone were ti to switch from AdSense to your startup, they might suddenly find themselves with their traffic having tanked. Why would google search send them to their site, when they can send the visitor to a site where google also makes money..
What do you mean? The logical thing is $. That's it. Nothing hidden here. Google knows how many times it sends people there. I can't imagine that it's any significant numbers in Google terms of numbers. The author says it "gets a steady stream of traffic", but no definition of what that actually means. It's probably a rounding number of a rounding number to Googs. With that in mind, yeah, it's not worth it to Googs even if it magically returns this site when the very niche phrase "apportionment calculator" is used. I can say that until this article I had never seen those two words together.
If a simple useful site already gets a high percentage of clicks from Google Searches for its functionality, and wants to show ads, that’s $.
Right?
Why would PageRank rate a site highly, and funnnel people to it, while Adsense doesn’t want to monetize it?
I can’t come up with a sensible reason.
All I can think is Adsense is becoming so gamey, so sophisticated at monetizing spam and low quality content, that they are dropping the ball on engagement with simple quality, even when it leaves money on the table. I.e. this is an oversight.
You’re ignoring the part about numbers of visitors and the lack of actual numbers. While the author may feel they are decent, Googs may think they are not.
> For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic.
What does not enough traffic mean? As a measure? As a rationale? What threshold was not achieved here that makes actual sense?
High quality links to pages with Google ads are all Google should care about at its most self-interested. There is no “too small” because it is all incremental. Why send someone somewhere and not have an ad there?
If they got more traffic due to the intentional crap additions, what does that tell you about Google Search?
This is an example of full failure of Google to even take care of their own interests.
Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did. In a purely practical sense you changed the site, not them.
Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.
But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.
Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?
The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.
To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.
Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?
We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible.
But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
> Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
Political ads? Campaign ads?
Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?
People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
Indeed, selling ads like this directly is the old school way of doing it.
But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but (1) we did once[1], because you're right that it seems like an obvious fit. But in practice (2) it got absolutely crushed in the market performance-wise by more sophisticated algorithms like Facebook's and Google's (Amazon plays in this world too, though they have an easier space to search). It turns out that the fundamental game in the ad world isn't serving ads that site administrators and content creators think their users want to see, it's figuring out what the users of that content actually want and showing them that instead.
And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.
[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.
It wasn't just the meta tags that were abused. People were adding text into invisible elements, or text as the same color as the background, etc. This was the precursor to SEO and ads really, and just people trying to get listed higher in search.
As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created
Well firstly, I'm not sure the site author knows the demographic. I'm pretty sure he doesn't ask that sort of thing before doing the calculation.
Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content.
Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites".
Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
Google has a monopoly though. Multiple monopolies even.
If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google
Tell me more about the advertising potential an alternative advertiser would see in this site?
Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
I would think this tool is useful for students or journalists. Grammarly and other writing tools would be relevant. Obviously, people who are interested in government or politics, so political ads are hugely relevant.
Cause then everyone tells Google that their demographic is the one that shows ads that pay the best.
Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game.
I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
If everyone that wants to scam Google just says they have whatever audience pays best, that should result in lots of slots for that audience. Somehow that should tank the price, right?
Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
Google has been sending me emails about how things are preventing them from indexing my websites,and recently I've stopped caring.
My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.
> Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?
Funnily enough, tools are best monetised as SEO enhancers. His tool would have incredible page rank, and by linking to a "Made with love by congressblog.com" from that tool (and all the others he has made) and then populating congressblog.com with lots of content about like, congress, he could monetise THAT site with ads. He didn't have to ruin the calculator.
EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.
> Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did.
That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!"
Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too.
If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)
>> of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising.
Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it.
The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
Are you suggesting the author's site is now better for advertisers?
My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent).
Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
> No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.
Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.
Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.
Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.
You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.
If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
> Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers."
1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing?
In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from.
2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to extend their ad ~monopoly to his web page. A refusal that gets satisfied only after he loads his site up with useless, time wasting crap.
I'll grant the author did have a choice. The author could be denied access to Google's ad monopoly or he could crap up his web page.
I'm surprised no one commenting has really got this point. The truth is Google has a choice about the model it uses, Google has created the advertising industry online.
Again, you disclaim Google of any responsibility for choice but hold the author to one? Doesn't that biased difference strike you as jarring?
That's the point here. Everyone seems to complicate it; it's pretty simple.
I'm not against you specifically, I just think this is a clear issue. Admittedly, not a lot of people grasp this right now.
> Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits...
There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claiming they had none.
At the same time, I don't take issue with the title -- I don't read it as abdicating responsibility. The author knows he can remain ad-less. It's just a catchy way to say "I had to make these changes to get approved by ad-sense."
You do always have a choice. If you surrender that you become...inhuman...I think. Because you've said: "Now this thing I've done, is not my fault." Then you go around looking for other people to blame, which makes you a monster.
To be more clear (which is useful I think): it's not your choice what the world presents to you, but you choose how you respond always.
As long as you're not unconscious of course. If your mind is there, you're choosing.
But ultimately where you come down on that is up to you. I guess it comes down to: with how much integrity do you plan to live? :)
There could be some edge cases, but it's important to remember how valid that is for the majority of experience.
I didn't start it like this, but that got dark quick hahahah! :)
Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.
Oh, I agree it's still a crappy site for advertising. He gamed the algorithm to get onto the program.
Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid.
On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views.
I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
If he’s getting paid per impression, then I don’t see how the payout will be unexpected terrible considering the site has existing traffic. Of course he could be paid by click, in which case you are probably right.
Does Adsense pay for impressions? Legit question, I have no idea... I imagine $-per-impression would be impressively low... Isn't $-per-click pretty low anyway?
It's really hard to know what a "steady stream" is without useful quantification. I mean to you or me a steady stream might be 100 people a day. Or a million. It's hard to say. (And clearly that would be useful knowledge in the context of evaluating the value of the site.)
On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.
Point here though is that author shouldn't have had to add the extra stuff.
There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not?
By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved.
This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly.
Google knows who the visitor is, what ads they clicked before and so on. They also know the search terms the site ranks for. What is on the site is just one clue as to what to serve.
You're arguing Google has sensible motives. That doesn't particularly matter. What matters is what they encourage website owners to do in practice. Apparently that is to fill your website with worthless junk text.
My point is that Google has sensible motives, and that people with perfectly good sites will butcher them in the hope of making a buck, and then blame Google.
Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on.
The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google.
The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
Google has sensible motives but, undoubtedly owing to a lack of strong competition, they are not very good at serving these motives.
The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business.
If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently.
Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.
Google didn't 'make' the site owner change anything, there is obviously the choice not to serve ads and not change the site.
However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements.
The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place.
Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted?
The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.
"Hey there, fellow political enthusiasts and furry friend lovers! We're Alex and Taylor, and we're on a mission..."
This really made me smile. It's one of the stupid phrases used in all of these types of sites that bothers me to no end. Iliza Shlesinger has a bit about two sisters doing a pitch to Shark Tank, and I read that whole "post" in the voice she uses. I always thought it was just me and my curmudgeon ways, but clearly if "AI" has picked up on it, then I see it as definite justification for my take.</rant>
i <3 this person for taking it this direction to prove a point. I've been known to do stupid stuff like this myself, and had the same ultimate point. It made a few people smile, but most people just rolled their eyes.
I routinely speak with said creator of website). I have let him know this thread is here to appreciate the wide conversation on here.
I do genuinely love that I write 13,000 words on issues with AI on the site to little response. But some of the more silly stuff like this is the higher traction stuff on the site. Just glad to see said author is getting the attention he deserves.
There’s currently so many words about AI everyday that I just don’t care any more. There’s a very obvious trend taking place with AI that the fanboys are willfully ignoring while contributing to it at the same time while those not drinking of the AI kool-aid sit back and watch history repeat itself.
So when things not related to AI are posted, it stands out and gains traction.
Did you write the replika stuff? I'm currently chewing through the two parter and its an enjoyable read. It seems like there is quite a lot of interesting content on that site and I'm extremely happy it has presented itself to me. If not, which articles did you write? I want to read them.
It's a fair point about how awful recipe sites look without ad blockers, but this part is just plain incorrect:
> You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam.
At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs.
The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.
I just looked up Cookie and Kate. On my iPad I had to flick 7 times to get past the exposition on Crispy Roasted Chickpeas and find the actual ingredients. When I found the ingredients, they occupied a small squeezed sliver of the page. As I was counting the number of simultaneous ads surrounding the ingredient list (4 separate ads), a pop up covered them all and suggested I sign up for her newsletter.
The recipe looks good (chickpeas, olive oil, salt, spices, oh shit I stole her blog post). I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".
I got so fed up with this that I made a browser extension for it. It's in the Chrome Web Store and Firefox as well, but you'll have to build the xcode project in the Safari directory if that's your preferred browser.
I generally use https://www.taste.com.au. No bullshit prologue about how a distant relative used to make the recipe in question. Just and overview, photo ingredients and steps. Everything else is secondary and usually worthless.
"Just Learn To Read" adds nothing to the sentence that precedes it. The point was already made correctly and well. You should avoid when possible starting a comment you want to actually be read with an insult or ending it with a snap. It degrades the quality of the conversation.
The problem is that Google started weighing time spent on page very heavily in their ranking algorithm - I don't remember at what point this happened but it must be about a decade ago by now. Every time a user clicks a Google result without using "Open in New Tab" and clicks the back button, Google gets a signal about how long they spent on the page. The longer a user spends on the site, the stronger the signal. Once all the SEO vampires figured it out, everyone started to pile on prologues to all their content, not just recipe sites. In my experience that was the beginning of the end.
Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.
Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for?
If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up?
The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for a while) is a better metric, but also not ideal: did they stay because they found what they were looking for, or was the result just that confusing they had to stay to comprehend whether it was the right thing? Most often it's because they found what they were looking for, but the pathological cases hide in the middle: many similar correct results, winner is the one that makes the user a little slower.
(This has nothing to do with tabs or back buttons, by the way. It happens any time they can detect subsequent clicks on the search result page.)
I've worked in the search space (though on less evil projects than Google) and I still struggle with the question on how to evaluate search. If you have ideas, let me know!
One idea, but people will probably hate me for it:
If you return to e.g. the google search site (hence: when the long click metric would be triggered) have a dialog on top saying ‘result great / OK / bad-or-confusing’.
Can probably be gamed (bot nets trying to destroy the reputation of others) but at least a long time would not automatically mean ‘great result’. (In the arms race to combat destruction, it could be so that a ‘bad-or-confusing’ click would not actually push a value down, just not make it go higher).
I honestly don't think it's possible to have a QA team large enough to handle the gajillions of websites that come up and disappear every day. They just have to come up with better and better metrics until they find one that approximates the human experience the best.
> if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for?
Why do you care as a search engine? This is a natural human problem that can't be solved with technology, only by humans.
It used to be, that I went to page 5 of Google instantly, because that was where the real results were. The first few pages were people who knew more SEO than sense.
These days, that doesn't work since "semantic search" because now it appears to be sorted by some relevance metric and by about page 5 you start getting into "marginally related to some definition of what you typed in but still knows too much SEO to be useful."
The point is, this was already a solved problem if you knew to go to about page 4-5. Then people started trying to use a technical solution to a very human problem.
Wait, are you really asking why a search engine would care how well it finds what the user is looking for?
Granted, there are a lot of search engines that sell themselves on other metrics ("it's fast!" or "it uses AI!" or "it's in the cloud!") but any serious search engine player strives to learn how good it is -- in practise -- at helping the user find what they are looking for. That's ultimately the purpose of a search engine.
> Wait, are you really asking why a search engine would care how well it finds what the user is looking for?
While a useful metric, it's an unknowable metric.
1. You have no idea if the user even knows what they are looking for, so how would you know that they found it?
2. You have no idea if the user found what they are looking for, maybe what they are looking for isn't on the internet?
3. You have no idea if the user is even looking for something, maybe it was just a cat running across the keyboard?
The only way to learn the answer is to have humans talk to humans. You can't game your way through it by using metrics.
It reminds me of this one time the CEO asked our team to add a metric for "successful websites" (we were a hosting provider) and we rebuffed with "define successful." They immediately mentioned page views, which we replied "what about a restaurant with a downloadable menu that google links to directly?" and back and forth with "successful" never being defined for all verticals and all cases. It just isn't possible to define using heuristics.
I disagree. It's unfortunate that some users don't know what they want, some want things that don't exist, and that some are cats. But most users are humans with a rough idea of an existing thing they are looking for. It's worth it for a search solution to find out how good it is at helping them. The cats add noise to that measurement, they don't invalidate it.
Do you philosophically agree there are websites that are more successful than others? If yes, then there are tangible qualities that distinguish this group from the other. They may be subjective, fuzzy, and hard to pin down, but they're still there. If no, a success measure is irrelevant to you but other people might disagree, and once thoroughly investigated, you sort of have to agree the measurement coming out of it reflects their idea of success.
In none of this am I saying it's simple or easy (I started this subthread by saying it's difficult!) but fundamentally knowable.
Yes, humans talking to humans is definitely the start. But then I'm posivistically enough inclined that I think with effort we can extract theories from these human interactions.
I didn’t go into all the problems with “successful websites” but it really is impossible to measure. For me, my business site is successful when I capture leads, my blog is successful when I write posts, a restaurant is successful when people show up to eat. There’s no way of knowing what variables and metrics constitute success without asking the person.
I had a CEO who searched for the related business search terms every morning. No clicks, he just wanted to see the ranking. The other day, I was searching for an open NOC page that I knew existed but couldn’t remember the search terms. Eventually I gave up, but I’m 90% sure I left the tab open to a random promising search result that had nothing to do with what I was really searching for. There’s a pdf that archive.org fought over and simply mentioning it results in a DCMA, you can find it now, but for nearly 20 years, you could only find rumors of it on the internet and a paper copy was the only way you could read it.
Even when I know what I’m looking for exactly, I sometimes open a bunch of tabs to search results and check all of them, (This is actually the vast majority of my non-mobile searches) especially because the search results are often wrong or miss some important caveats — especially searching for error messages.
The only way you could find out these searches were unsuccessful (or successful) is to ask. There’s no magic metrics to track that will tell you whether or not my personal experience found the search successful.
Google also massively reduced AdSense payouts over the years as well.
Result? Adsense-based websites started jamming in more ads per page to maintain their old revenue levels. Pages became longer so that more ads could be thrown in.
There are SEO industry nerds that scour Google patents for clues (this long click metric was an early 2010s patent that was granted in 2015), and Google lets information slip from time to time, either officially or unofficially.
The first site "cookieandkate" might look like blogspam but it wasn't.
After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.
[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.
[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.
Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.
That's pretty depressing. I don't really do any kind of content marketing work these days and haven't really been around that industry for a decade, but I can only imagine how disappointing it must have been to start seeing your traffic drop off, seeing which results were winning in search compared to your own site, seeing how they were winning, and then having to add more and more shit to your own site in order to climb back up the rankings.
The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.
Because websites aren't free to build or run. No one is obligated to put ads on their site, sure. They're also not obligated to work for many hours to provide you with free content or pay $X/no to serve it to you.
But they can also have a separate job that doesn't ruin the internet and produce out of generosity, like some of us, free content that is not span ridden.
Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind.
And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.
While it is admirable that you are willing to produce content out of your own generosity, it seems a little optimistic to assume that everyone making content on the internet is both willing and able to share it for free.
I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.
We need to find a metric for anti-profitability. I think that index could yield much higher quality results.
Detect sales/commercial language and structure,* and specifically target that for removal from results as if sales-oriented sites were hardcore porn and the child safety filter is turned on.
*Buy and cart buttons/functions, tables containing prices with descriptions but don't look like long-form reviews (which would be it's own filterable tag), etc, and domains trying to obfuscate are blacklisted permanently.
Really just removing all sites with ads would be a huge improvement. Regular old websites trying to sell you something are usually not nearly as bad as those that want to monetize you while pretending to be free.
The people who have bad content are the ones to get money, while those who have good content are not. Logical result is that people with good content stop producing that content while the people with bad content continue producing it and being rewarded for it.
Look I hate these SEO-laden pages just as much as the next guy, but I think the binary classification of "good content" and "bad content" lacks nuance. I would refer to it instead as "bad packaging" of (often) good content. As much as I loathe having to hunt for the "jump to recipe" button on my phone each time I open one of these pages, I also appreciate being able to freely view recipes which I enjoy and cook regularly.
I just stopped looking for receipts online if I can avoid it. It became literally faster and easier to search in old school cook book. And there was period when I considered those completely outdated.
The thing is, even if you don't put ads on a page or tool, Google will sometimes not index it because it doesn't think there's 'enough' content, no matter how little sense that makes. At least half the issues with recipe sites and company sites come from them trying to get a site that doesn't need reems of text content indexed by a search engine that seems to blindly value the quantity of content and time spent on the page over all else.
When it looks and acts like the spam sites, then what difference is there really? If I have to scroll 4 pages to find the ingredients and then scroll around like crazy to find the instructions (then scroll back and forth while cooking/baking) then it does not matter how good the recipe is, the page killed it for me.
I'd argue that most web users have a higher tolerance for ads than HN users, so they put up with the scrolling. And if it results in a tasty recipe, then they'll do it next time too, since that's seemingly the (tolerable) price to be paid for good food.
But lots of recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top, so they've realised the junk is annoying for some fraction of their users. Although page junk is a pain, shortcuts for low-tolerance users seems like a good compromise.
Look it's not OK to milk humans like this. It's manipulative and rapey. Just because the NPC meme is true does not mean you get to hack their programming for a buck and call yourself a good community member and businessman.
I suspect you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.
FWIW, I tried a few recipes too and they came out just fine, without the usual clutter. I further anticipate that this is the direction we'll be going in general, "search" as we know it was a ~30 year period where Google reigned supreme. The world since moved on.
Yeah, but the new gatekeepers and tech are going to be worse. Ai companies, where you never see original human content any more. Just what the company’s ai shows you
>I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".
This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours?
Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredients, either.
You should try viewing the site without your ad blocker turned on. Here's a preview: https://imgur.com/a/FDI0L6i. The red arrow is where ad #4 was when I checked it out last night.
Edit: real cookbooks was basically my answer to this problem to be honest. Some of them actually have fun stories in them. Most of them have a standard-ish "recipe on one page, photo on the opposite page" format. But none of them have promo codes for shoes, supplements, or terrible Canadian coffee chains in them.
I laughed out loud at this. You haven’t looked up many recipes in the last few years, have you? 95% of recipe results are nonsense and ads. It can take a few minutes of searching just to identify ingredients sometimes. My wife and I have been improvising recipes lately to avoid digging through all the junk. I actually recommend this: you can sort of make stuff up based on prior experience and things turn out pretty well sometimes.
Or, put your simplified recipes in a binder near the kitchen
Anything to avoid going to google to find a recipe
Have you thought about alternative monetization methods like Buy Me A Coffee? A good "this work is done for free pleading emoji" message can get you some decent cash. Maybe selling your site to someone that can monetize it is your best bet. Yeah your site isn't what Google Ads wants, that's a shame, but then that's on you to come up with an alternative.
Why does it have to be on them to come up with an alternative instead of... like... acknowledging that monopolies and businesses approaching them are harmful to both consumers and businesses?
Look no further than Google fucking around either third-party cookies every year to demonstrate how overpowered they are.
Think whatever you want of the ad industry, but Google flipping on that every year changes the project roadmap for every competitor in the adtech world. And when they flip again mid-year, it can invalidate months of work that teams have done.
In the end, all adtech companies are happy to see third-party cookies survive, so no one complains when Google backs out of killing them, but the point is that Google’s decisions change the project roadmaps for every competitor because no one is actually competing with Google. They have entirely too much control over the way the internet runs.
Because if there are alternatives, then it isn't a monopoly. Even if we're restricting ourselves to ads, there are other ad networks, and you can find your own sponsors. The OP is a self-admitted lazy commie and just wants to say "Google bad".
This was made more as an example of how much power Google has. While Google is not technically a monopoly, using any alternative is most likely going to hurt your potential reach. Essentially, damned if you do, damned if you don't with no middle ground.
>A good "this work is done for free pleading emoji" message can get you some decent cash
Source?
As far as I know you will need to put banners so users know you accept donations (as OP accepts donations in their support page and you literally missed that), and most people don't donate, so what tends to happen is you replace banners that everyone hates but that pays money with banners that everyone hates that don't pay money.
I know from work I've done with voluntary contributions that you can get near the amount that ad sense will give you, but that's on the high end, and will depend on the type of content and how you push it. But it would have at least been worth trying, given the public service nature of the content. Certainly enough to cover the costs of the domain name and hosting.
Also, people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
Also, the OP DOES NOT have a support page linked on the original, or meme page of apportionmentcalculator.com. Don't know why you're giving me snark when it seems you yourself didn't even look at their site.
I think I saw a banner when I scrolled to the bottom as well, but it isn't showing again for some reason.
I assume that they already had this page before they chose to monetize with adsense, which kind of implies that asking for donations hasn't been very effective for OP.
>people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
I disagree. Do you want to know what my hot take is?
Imagine, for one moment, that we didn't have ads on the internet.
Instead, every page was full of banners begging for donations.
Instead of ad-blockers, everyone would be using donation-blockers.
All that "concern" I keep hearing about about privacy and tracking and long lists of partners in cookie banners would disappear in an instant, and everyone would show that what they really care about is just being mildly inconvenienced by distracting banners telling you to do things and nothing more.
That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.
Yeah I know they have a donation button hidden away on their main site, on a different domain. That's not what we're talking about. The problem is that OP is so fucking stupid that they didn't realize they basically cut their conversation rate by several orders of magnitude with their design. It doesn't take a genius to make a large highlighted message at the top and bottom begging for a donation.
As for your hot take, I see no reason why I should take that seriously. Plenty of contribution requests exist today and have not been blocked, and they seem to drive okay conversation. Ads and contributions are not the same, and different strategies will emphasize them differently.
> That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.
I'd guess that'd be true so long as what replaces ads is also annoying/distracting/intrusive, misleading, a security/privacy risk, gets in people's way, and/or prevents them getting to what they requested/came for. Hopefully, something intended to replace ads wouldn't be any of those things.
Ideally the ads wouldn't be replaced with anything at all. It seems unlikely that we'll go back to how things were when people published content online because they just wanted to share something cool or useful with anyone who was interested, but maybe it'll get to the point where it's easy and affordable enough that publishing a table of data, or a recipe, or a simple calculator doesn't cost a person enough to justify worrying about ads or whatever replaces them.
Here we all are on this website after all, typing up comments without demanding payment from anyone and everyone who reads what we have to say or putting flashing ad banners on them. It doesn't cost us much to do it, so we do, without any profit motive.
Fair, ads should be viable, but OP really didn't try very hard on that front. There are plenty of ad networks that could be a substitute, but I understand that they're not as good as Google ads, and OP is lazy.
Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.
I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls, but that's pretty far off.
if there was an apple pay button i would have given him a dollar but instead there's "buy me a coffee" which i've never heard of, stripe which im not filling out, and liberapay which iirc is for crypto nerds
i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)
Google is selling surveillance not ads. Getting a static ad just like a magazine would be the natural fit for such a website.
Bonus question: ads with tracking cost X, ads without cost Y. In actual numbers tell me how much more X is worth. 2Y, 10Y, 100Y? (There are studies on this)
Wouldn't the surveillance work just fine on that site?
Also my memory suggests 3x. But I'll go check.
Top result says 2.6x from ftc.gov but is from last decade.
Another result says "Targeted ads are twice more effective as non-targeted ads, and retargeted display ads encourage 1000 percent more people to search for a product." In response to that, I will note that even if google could not discern the site content at all, that would only affect targeting and not retargeting. So that suggests 2x at most in this situation.
Ads, as long as they have not been banished from the world, should be viable in some form on a small useful site.
There are ideas about how to get rid of ads entirely, but I wanted to be more grounded to the current state of things for the purposes of that comment.
The craziest thing to me is that if you let Google manage the ads, it will create exactly the ad-infested website the article mentions, and that OP's website turned into, with vignettes and sliding ads from the bottom of the screen, and ads half the size of the screen above the fold. That isn't the result of the website's owner's hand. It's actually Google's autoads feature.
It's entirely possible that we have tons of people making websites that don't really know a lot technically, they just use Wordpress or something like that, and they add adsense and let Google manage it, and Google just does THIS every time. And if Google didn't have this autoads features, the entire web would have a lot less ads, because it's just more ads than a human being can manually place in a webpage every time.
The author has a very valid point about recipe websites. If you don't have a couple hundred words of prose and some multimedia, even if it's complete nonsense, it may as well not exist according to search engines. It's not just ad sales, though. It's also search rankings and even organic traffic.
I put some family recipes on my personal (mostly tech) blog under another category in my sidebar. Taking a verbatim couple words that should be reasonably unique from a recipe there doesn't show up in searches for it. I took a quick look at my traffic analytics and apart from myself, it gets an imperceptible (perhaps 1 or 2) unique visitors each week out of the average 500-ish. I'd imagine a few things are at play:
- most folks find my site looking for tech things, not recipes
- most websites have a "single theme" - I just don't want to follow that because it's mine and I have other interests :)
- I do not at all care how many people copy my recipe for grilled bread or whatnot.
- I also don't run pictures because I don't want to.
What I do care about is that I like the look of _my_ recipes when _I_ need them, much like the recipe sites that existed 10 or more years ago.
If there's any call to action here, please put some of your own recipes or hobby activities or game things or anything else on your site. You're an interesting whole human being and it's okay to be that (even if our search engine overlords don't reward that).
Flagged: this trips my internal GPT detector (patent pending) at 83% certainty and seems to be a lengthy meandering response to an article describing Google preventing ad blockers. The article is about Google asking for more content on the site before approving ads.
Yes, sarcastic, poking fun at myself for having a gut feeling -- so no, no classifier, afaik it's impossible to reliably. Though I would like to take a test and see my recognition rate, I wonder if there's a site for that...
Eerie..I looked at the account after I posted my comment...it made several other comments I noticed this week.
Nearly every single comment I remember seeing and thinking it sounded like GPT, and yet, had enough content to be not-GPT, and I figured I was being cranky.
Same vibe here except blatantly off-topic, and less content than the others
I don't think it is "pure GPT" because of the "As someone...". It seems more likely that this is someone who is using GPT to make their comments longer or "fancier". Or it might be a rare example of someone who actually talks like that.
> I looked into a half-dozen or so alternatives, but all the other companies were either simply Google ads re-sellers, which is an ecosystem I don't quite understand, or were extremely sketchy, and had reviews complaining about how they trick people into downloading malware and such.
This is so true. I have tried to monetize my tools with ads quite a few times before, and the only way was to use Adsense. It's actually crazy how there is literally no quality alternative.
If you only want your ads next to quality content or on sites that are not drowning in ads so your ad is more impactful, then Google won’t help. But a third party can provide that through their curated list of sites.
Basically they are in the business of providing human curated targeting parameters instead of the algorithm based that Google supplies.
550 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 452 ms ] threadYes, tragicomic.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tragicomic
There's also the laugh-cry emoji, which can be used for both situations, I think.
For bittersweet, there's one about smiling with a tear.
For tragicomic, I don't know. It's not a feeling. Maybe the upside-down smiley or the smile with sweatdrop?
——
I hate it when i see such useless explanations
> manifesting both tragic and comic aspects
Sounds like you sold out. You should own up to your agency in the matter.
They made me make it worse so I could make more money - it’s like you think you are under unique pressure to pay bills, thus excusing you, but everyone else in the world shouldn’t be excused.
This all coming from "an anticapitalist tech blog" humoured me a little.
> Loading... if you can still see this message, this post probably doesn't exist.
When I tried putting a few Google Ads on it to pay the hosting costs, it rejected it until I added long-form descriptions of the content. So instead of a useful chart and table, I ended up having long-winded descriptions of the location, algorithm, search, elevation’s effect on snowpack, and all that.
It was so fucking stupid I just up and deleted the whole project and never looked back. I’m sure I could have made the tool better and charged a subscription or something if it was actually useful, but it just kind of made me jaded on the modern web. I gave up and went hiking.
All of those sites should be banned - but now i see it's Google encouraging them - such an extreme downgrade in usability from a basic html site from 30 years ago.
Something has gone extremely wrong on a huge scale culturally and politically.
But seriously, the craving is real...
I thought Google vetted their advertisers? Are they just accepting ads from anyone now?
1: https://lifehack.getconsumerchoice.com/ (proceed at own risk)
Who controls this ratio? Is it configurable? I.e. could OP choose minimal ads and reduced monetization? Or does everyone always get the firehose?
It would only show the poems create. I tried Adsense, was rejected for lack of content (probably, because they are mysterious about the reason they reject you). Then I tried adding lists of words starting with the letters used as initials for the acrostics. Rejected again.
Then I gave up, and decided to use affiliate links.
[0] www.acrostic.ai
Google shouldn't exist at its scale, nor should Apple, Microsoft, nVidia, ...
Automatic breakup based on stock price is a terrible idea. (Market capitalization is total value of stock in a publicly traded company.)
If you figure out a system where that happens reliably, you've basically solved civilization.
Every google stock owner gets 1 share per share of google stock.
(perhaps thumbing the nose a bit too much, but the general idea...)
Your solution sounds great but in practice it's simplistic.
Instead, for things deemed worth having as law, we try to set the rules at levels that as many people as possible find as reasonable as possible (albeit in an imperfect way because there's indeed no way to get universal agreement on anything, and because not everyone acts in good faith when choosing, and because money influences politics too much, and all the other reasons why democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others).
Hell, even legal age of consent is arbitrary (please don't argue this -- if it's not it won't vary across developed countries).
The absolute majority of legal lines we drew are arbitrary.
This is bullshit. 18 is when consequences start, because that’s when you’re treated as an adult by the legal system.
Do they? I thought it was ignored everywhere.
Corporations are necessary for specialisation, e.g. even knowing what your legal liability is, having someone to enforce health and safety rules, being able to run a production line rather than having one person spend about a year making a single car.
We can't get most of the interesting things we see in developed economies just by sole traders hiring someone directly for each thing without a corporate structure, partly because that too is a specialisation, and partly because that's way too fragile (every such thing either has a bus number of 1, or it's a mediocre reinvention of a corporation).
The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.
I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Physically disassembled in its entirety by a paperclip maximiser.
> the rich are richer than ever off of the hard work of the poor.
And the poor are, too.
The natural state of our species: https://youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550?si=xUTMUkTdB3oT...
> The corporation cares not about humanity or the rule of law, but yet we treat it as a person.
A legal fiction, but not exactly identical.
Countries too, "L'État, c'est moi" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'%C3%89tat%252C_c'est_moi
> I would challenge you that these "miracles" of the corporation will doom is all.
Could be. There's a reason we don't see aliens in the sky.
A the same time the "miracle" of collective action that you want to get rid of — because everything corporations do wrong is also done by other kinds of co-operations — isn't really just corporations, it's everything that makes us primates.
That's why you need to be more precise than "just ban them all", why the simple and obvious solution is wrong.
You can join the US military at 17, why this arbitrary number, why not 16, why not 20?
If the parent has lots of experience with African economies then the value might be a distillation of the latter complicated ensemble of functions into something very meaningful.
You're suggesting that if Google was smaller then that would make this site more appealing to advertisers? That having more advertising companies would make this site more valuable?
On the other hand there are several large supermarket chains where I live, and while I have a small artisinal cheese making hobby, so far my interactions with any of them to put it on their shelves have been equally soulless.
Perhaps in this context the issue is not monopoly, but rather that I have nothing of value to offer them.
If your relationship to a company is so worthless that they can't spend 5 minutes of an employee's day talking to you, then what value could they possibly be providing you?
It's the site owner providing Google with value (that they want Google to pay for).
It's not incumbent for companies to interact with every person who thinks they _should_ be a supplier to said company. I get people cold calling me every day wanting to be my supplier. I absolutely ignore most of that.
In this case Google's algorithm did not ignore the potential supplier. It evaluated the site and sent a reply saying basically "thanks, but no thanks".
Now, I understand your gripe - an algorithm did this, not a human. But this has been the Google way since long before they were a fifth of this size. So it's not like a competitor changes Google's way of doing business.
And Google's way is not a secret. If you don't like it, then don't have a business relationship with them (as a supplier or customer.)
Lots of ads don't care very much what site they are on, even if the purpose of the site is somehow unknowable.
But google knows the traffic it sends there. And it's able to show ads alongside those search results. Why can't it put similar ads on the page?
And apparently adding the dumb text unlocked ads, so there's the value being put to work. The old site has the same value, google just refused to recognize it.
> how that value might be unlocked?
Uhh, put ads on the site and the ads will get valuable views.
I don't know what you're asking here.
Or are you asking how competition between advertising networks would help? You wouldn't see several big networks in healthy competition all having the same bad requirements that a superpower can get away with.
I think Google (probably rightly) sees no value in this site from an advertising point of view. I think if there were 5 advertising aggregators they'd say the same.
You're suggesting Google is leaving money on the table, not just for this site, but a lot of others like it. I'm suggesting that if this category of site had value to an advertising aggregator, someone would be leveraging it (and that someone eould likely be Google.)
What makes you say these things? Google isn't walking away from a deal here. They are simply imposing their own rules knowing that the publisher has very little choice but to comply. Google probably knows that the enshitified version of the site makes them more money, but that doesn't mean a cleaner site has no value. It's just not maximising advertising income at the cost of user experience.
If there were several ad networks competing for this kind of business then each of them would have less power to impose their rules. Their margins would be far lower. Advertisers would pay less and/or sites would be making more money. And sites might have a choice to prioritise user experience over maximising ad revenue.
but the problem is that there are no "2,3,4,5' options - there's only one. And it has no incentive for "good people" to leverage
But let's imagine you're CEO of option 2. What do you think you might do differently which would make this site, in its original form, appealing to advertise on?
Having multiple ad companies doesn't sound like an improvement when the advertising space on offer doesn't seem to be good for advertising.
Or to put it another way, do you feel this space does have value, but Google is leaving that value on the table? If so, why hasn't some other company taken advantage of this value?
That, in itself, is not actually a win. There would need to be traffic, clicks on ads, and so on to be a win.
There's no evidence (either way, it's simply not mentioned) if the site actually makes any revenue from the ads that are now on it. Perhaps the automated Adsense algorithm was correct "the original site isn't a good ad site" - and the mistake is that it can't see what "seems" to be true to us, which is that the new site is no better.
That said, Google is not actually a monopolist in online advertising. There's also Facebook, Amazon and a couple of smaller ones like X and Microsoft. The problem is that the big ones appear to have cleanly divvied up the space without stepping on each others' toes much.
For instance, Amazon does compete with Google for advertisers' money, but it has very little effect on the choice a website like Apportionment Calculator has as they can't sell their site on Amazon.
Similarly, I'm not sure how much of a competition Facebook Audience Network actually is for AdSense. I think it's mostly interesting for sites that have a significant Facebook/Instagram presence. Again, not much of a choice for small web apps like Apportionment Calculator.
But that's not the real complaint here. The real complaint is that Google did not consider the original site to be "ad supplier worthy".
As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
No, that was not the complaint. The complaint is that Google demanded changes that made the site worse for users. These changes are clearly meant to optimise ad revenue.
Google is in a position of power that allows them to make these demands. More competition between ad networks would reduce the power of each individual ad network and give publishers more negotiating power.
>As you say, there are other advertising players - but if none of them see value (in the original site) then maybe that's telling us something?
As I understand it, no other ad networks have even seen the site. Amazon and Facebook are clearly unsuitable. Microsoft may have been worth a shot. For this type of site I think Google has a nearly complete monopoly.
It absolutely is the root of all problems, but people, consciously or not, will deny it and try to justify how it is necessary or how accumulated capital is not the issue.
Beware of that while reading the responses.
Beware that you're a hypocrite and don't realize it so you will argue that you aren't, but it's proof that you are.
It's super obnoxious when someone says that.
But the comment you're replying to does not say that.
This is why big companies like this end up with governments defending them, they aren't too big to fail, they are too big for others to let them fail.
To an extent every business must generalise and specialise in various configurations as they get going and differentiate themselves, but at the point where Apple is building its own silicon which it then puts in its own hardware on which you can install software from their app store, regulators should be able to clearly say "if you're going to make chips, you have to let other people buy them too" and "if you're going to have an app store you have to let other people have an app store too" and so on.
That's not feasible for a very small business, but it's not as if you can apply a "market cap" point at which it becomes feasible. You can however pretty easily tell when a company has a "wholesale" division and a "retail" division and is essentially selling to themselves in the same way as another company might sell to them. It's always challenging codifying that stuff into law but we have a pretty long history of doing so, I don't think it would be an insurmountable regulatory challenge.
What does this mean?
In terms of GDP, the median African country is Benin, with a GDP of about $20 billion. Maybe you want mean instead. The average GDP across the 51 countries in Africa is $56 billion.
Do you think that, um, Chipotle with its market cap of $88 billion should be broken up? What about Costco? Its market cap is over $300 billion, and it has quarterly revenue of about $60 billion -- if it were a country in Africa, its annual revenue would rank in the top 5 in terms of GDP.
The aggregate GDP of all of Africa is about $2.9 trillion. Literally only Microsoft exceeds that today.
Are you just picking companies with a market cap above $2 trillion? What about $1 trillion? $500 billion? Alphabet's market cap at the end of 2016 was $540 billion. Has Google's influence over the internet increased meaningfully since then?
(I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis; I'm just trying to understand your benchmark.)
In the end the problem is capitalism, the idea that investors (people merely looking to turn money into more money) should be considered the only owners of companies.
That forces this eternal growth model on us that enshittifies everything.
But that's a normal startup problem. What makes it impossibility to beat google is that they control so many other parts:
- they know everything about the visitor. What they've searched for on google, which videoes they watch on YouTube, which websites you visit through their ads or browser, where you normally shop through Maps, who you keep in contact with through Gmail, which apps you use on your Android. Etc. Etc. There is no way you can place more relevant ads than them.
Secondly, if someone were ti to switch from AdSense to your startup, they might suddenly find themselves with their traffic having tanked. Why would google search send them to their site, when they can send the visitor to a site where google also makes money..
Not sure if this was an intentional pun or you are more right than you realize...
They would rather send people to large piles of crap?
So broken - I can’t even come up with an enshittification idiocratic economic game theory drunk CFO rationalization for that.
Right?
Why would PageRank rate a site highly, and funnnel people to it, while Adsense doesn’t want to monetize it?
I can’t come up with a sensible reason.
All I can think is Adsense is becoming so gamey, so sophisticated at monetizing spam and low quality content, that they are dropping the ball on engagement with simple quality, even when it leaves money on the table. I.e. this is an oversight.
But it is a very dysfunctional oversight.
What does not enough traffic mean? As a measure? As a rationale? What threshold was not achieved here that makes actual sense?
High quality links to pages with Google ads are all Google should care about at its most self-interested. There is no “too small” because it is all incremental. Why send someone somewhere and not have an ad there?
If they got more traffic due to the intentional crap additions, what does that tell you about Google Search?
This is an example of full failure of Google to even take care of their own interests.
Which leads us to the "why" of it. Which is you wanted to monetize the site (if only to cover its costs.) Since advertising seems to be the business model of the internet that's your first port of call.
But here's a site that performs a task. Quite who uses this site is unclear. Sure lots of people might use it (for some definition of lots) but the site doesn't really give signals to adsense.
Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
Ok,I'm simplifying here, but what ads do you think -should- be shown to your visitors? Ads derived from their browsing history of sites that do intuit user context?
Are users browsing an arbitrary rubbish website more or less likely to be distracted by some special offer? Are people visiting your site to do some very specific task, presumably for a concrete reason, more or less likely to be distracted by an ad?
The problem isn't Google. The problem is that our ability to monetize the web starts and ends with adverts. Which means that sites that "do stuff" are a bad match, and therefore lack funding.
To be honest, I don't have a cunning plan of alternate funding. Probably the only other viable one is "take some of your day-job money and effectively sponsor the site yourself." Which of course is the model you -were- on that you wanted to leave.
Why are words so important?
But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?
But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads.
Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.
Political ads? Campaign ads?
Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?
People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.
So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site.
Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....
But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.
And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.
[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.
As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created
Secondly the way Google determines the demographic is via the site content.
Or to put it another way; site owners don't have a "right" to Adsense. Google is clearly allowed to choose those sites it considers "to be good advertising sites".
Therefore if you have a site that doesn't offer good advertising opportunities, then don't be surprised if people don't want to advertise on it.
To be clear, I'm not saying all sites should be ad friendly. I'm saying that advertising alone cannot prop up every site, useful or not.
If Google had competition in the ads space, this would be less of an issue, as the author could pick an advertiser that works for their website, rather than contorting their website for google
Or to put it another way, what product should this be advertising on this site? Because there are a lot of companies in the world, so of you can identify just one of them, they'll likely pay enough for exclusivity.
Though people are doing that with SEO anyway so it is a weird game.
I think maybe all ads would need to be the same value to fix a lot of the nonsense. But I don't know if that could ever work, especially with how seasonal ad revenue is.
Then, ban pages that change their audience too often.
My website and it's content is what it is, and its not my job to make Google more valuable. They're a multi billion dollar company, if it's really a problem, they can figure it out.
Political ads? Ads targeted towards Americans (think cereal or whatever else why might see on national TV)? Crappy low-paying ads that aren't significantly targeted? Literally anything?
Plus, the auction value for spots on that site must be beyond tiny.
Oh right advertisers pay a price based on the amount of traffic so less traffic means even less cost for them.
EDIT: an alternative monetisation source if the OP didn't want to create a bunch of content would be affiliate links.
But how is the updated site any better? It surely must be, since it made it past the review, right? The whole post just shows how ridiculous and flawed the review process is and what it leads to.
> Of course Google didn't make the web site bad, you did.
That's right. Whenever anybody says "X made me do Y", sometimes I get flashes of the 1980/s1990s action movie villain, in the industrial backdrop, for the violence climax scene, with the hero on the ropes, screaming hysterically "You made me do this!"
Nobody makes you do anything. That's true from a strict personal responsibility standpoint, and it's an important boundary and important to remember: it's always your choice.
But of course that's not what this is about. It's about Google providing the incentive, for ruining perfectly good websites.
And we can get weaselly and say, "Well actually it's not Google, but it's the internet - or people - or technology - or economics - or thermodynamics" But the same point remains: Google chose to do this, too.
If we are to hold one to the standard of personal responsibility while relieving another of it for reasons of context and incentive? Well that just seems unfair. Hahaha! :)
Wait,what? The author wants to monetize the site. He understands the actual users won't pay. So looking for an alternate option he turns to advertising.
Google says "hey, unfortunately your site isn't appealing to advertisers." That's not Google's fault, they're just telling the truth as they see it.
The site author has many choices at this point. One of them is to make the site better for advertisers (and worse for users). He chooses this route. Google should have stopped this how?
My takeaway from the author's example is that Google has set up a system that is incentivising actions leading to worse outcomes for both users (frustrating search experience) and advertisers (whose ad spend is not being well spent).
Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
No. Gaming the system in bad faith was just gaming the system.
>> Google has no incentive to improve the situation - because google has an effective monopoly.
Improvement in this case I assume meaning "identifying the site gamed the rules".
I suspect, but don't know, that Google spends a lot on trying to identify site quality. But the ones building spammy (gamey?) sites are winning.
Everything you say here is true, yet misses the point.
Google search results are dominated by sites just like the one presented. This is something one no one likes - not the people doing the searches, nor the people doing the advertising and definitely (as this post shows) not the people creating the sites. They would much prefer just to put up their content without spending hours on creating LLM SEO spam. I'm sure Google is worried if they don't do better someone will they will lose relevance.
Inquiring minds what to know how we ended up here. The article provides just that. It explains how the incentives Google have put in place drove him to producing one of those sites. He wanted that ad revenue and he wanted search results to find his site and the only way he could find to do that without spending an inordinate amount of time on generating content he had no personal interest in was to pollute it with LLM spam.
You are criticising him for that, yet most web sites returned by Google all make that same choice. I guess according to you most of the web is acting in bad faith.
If your objective is to get out of this mess, I don't think explanations like "the word is shit because humanity sucks" are helpful. The explanation they are being pushed towards that choice by a perverse set of incentives is much more illuminating. Those incentives are controlled by one company - Google. That company could change them, either voluntarily or by being forced to.
1) Advertisers - plural? What other advertisers is Google referencing?
In this context, 'advertisers' means all the other meaningfully similar ad options that the author could choose from.
2) This wording: "The team has reviewed it but unfortunately your site isn’t ready to show ads at this time." is Google's clear and blatant refusal to extend their ad ~monopoly to his web page. A refusal that gets satisfied only after he loads his site up with useless, time wasting crap.
I'll grant the author did have a choice. The author could be denied access to Google's ad monopoly or he could crap up his web page.
It helps clarify that Google is lying - by pretending advertisers actively desire webpages that are unreadably overloaded with pap.
Again, you disclaim Google of any responsibility for choice but hold the author to one? Doesn't that biased difference strike you as jarring?
That's the point here. Everyone seems to complicate it; it's pretty simple.
I'm not against you specifically, I just think this is a clear issue. Admittedly, not a lot of people grasp this right now.
There's truth in this old chestnut but it has limits...
There's a spectrum from total freedom to pressure by incentives to the credible threat of violence. In extreme cases claiming someone "had a choice" is as ghastly as a free person claiming they had none.
Do you think it applies in this case? Do you think the incentive (a few $ at most) drove the author into a corner?
At the same time, I don't take issue with the title -- I don't read it as abdicating responsibility. The author knows he can remain ad-less. It's just a catchy way to say "I had to make these changes to get approved by ad-sense."
You do always have a choice. If you surrender that you become...inhuman...I think. Because you've said: "Now this thing I've done, is not my fault." Then you go around looking for other people to blame, which makes you a monster.
To be more clear (which is useful I think): it's not your choice what the world presents to you, but you choose how you respond always.
As long as you're not unconscious of course. If your mind is there, you're choosing.
But ultimately where you come down on that is up to you. I guess it comes down to: with how much integrity do you plan to live? :)
There could be some edge cases, but it's important to remember how valid that is for the majority of experience.
I didn't start it like this, but that got dark quick hahahah! :)
Isn't that what all the tracking and analytics is supposed to determine? I thought ads were supposed to be tailored to the viewer as much (if not more than) the site.
> Conversely Adsense sells ads based on "targeted users". Which means your original site is pretty useless to Adsense.
It might have been a fair point, but AI-generated word salad was enough to make this site palatable to AdSense - but I don't see how any of it would help the AI and/or mechanical turk supposedly assigning target-demographic labels to this site.
Of course getting into adsense isn't the goal, the goal was to make some money. But he didn't have a site worth advertising on before, and he doesn't now. I predict actual revenue will be equally turgid.
On the tracking front, sure, I mean I suppose some people go to the site. So it gets some views.
I have a road past my property which gets a few cars a day. Not sure putting up an advertising sign is useful there though...
That's not a fair analogy because the article describes the site like this:
> For years now, the site is consistently the top Google search result for "apportionment calculator," and gets a steady stream of traffic.
Sure, we could do with more specific info, but it sounds very far from "a few cars a day" to me.
On the other hand, if I was getting a million users per day, I'd probably figure out who would care about that audience, and sell to them directly.
There was ONE actual core piece of functionality they wanted to monetize, so why not?
By adding random crap, author was able to get it approved.
This just proves how everything is turning into the Internet Of Shit - or Enshitification. I loved how the article exposes this in context of the ad networks --- on which Google has an effective monopoly.
See also https://youtu.be/wVYG1mu8Lg8?si=xaAgN3jx2ZC-GCwr (The Internet is Starting to Break by MrWhoseTheBoss).
Google doesn't "encourage" people to butcher their site. Google has determined the kind of property they want to advertise on.
The owners of the site make their own choices. If they choose to game the review process then that's on them, not Google.
The owner now has a crappy site, which is still a bad place for ads (although the review doesn't know it.) The ultimate goal, of getting revenue, is perhaps still unrealized.
The fact that AdSense can be gamed incentives gaming. Unlike Google, websites like these DO have competition, and so the ones that game the system most effectively make profits and the ones that operate most ethically go out of business.
If Google does not want AdSense to be gamed, they should close the loopholes that make it so easily gameable and that punish honest customers. However, they are not strongly incentivized to do this because neither websites nor advertisers have any good altetnatives, so they aren't meaningfully losing business over it. And so funds that could go toward fixing this are, instead, used in areas that need the funding more urgently.
Assigning fault here is silly. The websites could be better AND Google could be better — but they will not become better without the right incentive structure.
However, once the site owner decided to use Adsense then in order to use this service the site needed to change according to Google's requirements.
The point being made is that in order to serve ads the site owner had to add a lot of useless information irrelevant to what was driving traffic to the site in the first place.
Why did the first attempt get rejected, yet the final attempt after making the website objectively worse gets accepted?
The useless information that needed to be added to the site contributes to the decline in quality many people are noticing when using google search nowadays. This article provides a very interesting explanation for this decline.
Or realize what using the service means for the website, and backpedal on the decision to use adsense.
This really made me smile. It's one of the stupid phrases used in all of these types of sites that bothers me to no end. Iliza Shlesinger has a bit about two sisters doing a pitch to Shark Tank, and I read that whole "post" in the voice she uses. I always thought it was just me and my curmudgeon ways, but clearly if "AI" has picked up on it, then I see it as definite justification for my take.</rant>
i <3 this person for taking it this direction to prove a point. I've been known to do stupid stuff like this myself, and had the same ultimate point. It made a few people smile, but most people just rolled their eyes.
This reminds me when I was driving around the pacific coast one year when a particular movie came out...
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/oct/03/spin-control-i...
The other side (as you were leaving town) of the sign read (if I recall correctly) "Fangs for coming, be bite back."
I do genuinely love that I write 13,000 words on issues with AI on the site to little response. But some of the more silly stuff like this is the higher traction stuff on the site. Just glad to see said author is getting the attention he deserves.
So when things not related to AI are posted, it stands out and gains traction.
> You can tell just by looking at the URLs that those sites are going to be worthelss blogspam.
At least two of the three results in the screenshot are from legitimate baking sites (Cookie and Kate, Sally's Baking Addiction) which are generally trusted sources online. I don't know anything about the third. But Google seems to have actually done a good job of highlighting recipes from reliable blogs.
The points about the compromised experience on those sites due to intrusive ads remain.
The recipe looks good (chickpeas, olive oil, salt, spices, oh shit I stole her blog post). I also think the site counts as "worthless blogspam".
https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter
https://www.taste.com.au/baking/galleries/autumn-cakes/p6d5x...
> When the weather starts to finally cool down and the evenings ...
Just No.
That's exactly the point. It doesn't need to be there, doesn't add any value whatsoever, etc. ;)
Any recipe site that survived had to adopt the tactic or die, leaving only the spammers and the odd outlier with actual content to write about like Serious Eats. Same thing happened to Youtube and their preview photos; even the legit content creators had to start making those stupid bug eye images.
Evaluating search is difficult because it's a tension: if users click a lot, is it because they find many valuable things, or because they didn't find what they were looking for?
If a user clicked just once, is it because they found what they were looking for or just that the rest of the results were so bad the user gave up?
The long click (user clicked, then didn't click again for a while) is a better metric, but also not ideal: did they stay because they found what they were looking for, or was the result just that confusing they had to stay to comprehend whether it was the right thing? Most often it's because they found what they were looking for, but the pathological cases hide in the middle: many similar correct results, winner is the one that makes the user a little slower.
(This has nothing to do with tabs or back buttons, by the way. It happens any time they can detect subsequent clicks on the search result page.)
I've worked in the search space (though on less evil projects than Google) and I still struggle with the question on how to evaluate search. If you have ideas, let me know!
Kind regards, Roel
Why do you care as a search engine? This is a natural human problem that can't be solved with technology, only by humans.
It used to be, that I went to page 5 of Google instantly, because that was where the real results were. The first few pages were people who knew more SEO than sense.
These days, that doesn't work since "semantic search" because now it appears to be sorted by some relevance metric and by about page 5 you start getting into "marginally related to some definition of what you typed in but still knows too much SEO to be useful."
The point is, this was already a solved problem if you knew to go to about page 4-5. Then people started trying to use a technical solution to a very human problem.
Wait, are you really asking why a search engine would care how well it finds what the user is looking for?
Granted, there are a lot of search engines that sell themselves on other metrics ("it's fast!" or "it uses AI!" or "it's in the cloud!") but any serious search engine player strives to learn how good it is -- in practise -- at helping the user find what they are looking for. That's ultimately the purpose of a search engine.
While a useful metric, it's an unknowable metric.
1. You have no idea if the user even knows what they are looking for, so how would you know that they found it?
2. You have no idea if the user found what they are looking for, maybe what they are looking for isn't on the internet?
3. You have no idea if the user is even looking for something, maybe it was just a cat running across the keyboard?
The only way to learn the answer is to have humans talk to humans. You can't game your way through it by using metrics.
It reminds me of this one time the CEO asked our team to add a metric for "successful websites" (we were a hosting provider) and we rebuffed with "define successful." They immediately mentioned page views, which we replied "what about a restaurant with a downloadable menu that google links to directly?" and back and forth with "successful" never being defined for all verticals and all cases. It just isn't possible to define using heuristics.
Do you philosophically agree there are websites that are more successful than others? If yes, then there are tangible qualities that distinguish this group from the other. They may be subjective, fuzzy, and hard to pin down, but they're still there. If no, a success measure is irrelevant to you but other people might disagree, and once thoroughly investigated, you sort of have to agree the measurement coming out of it reflects their idea of success.
In none of this am I saying it's simple or easy (I started this subthread by saying it's difficult!) but fundamentally knowable.
Yes, humans talking to humans is definitely the start. But then I'm posivistically enough inclined that I think with effort we can extract theories from these human interactions.
I had a CEO who searched for the related business search terms every morning. No clicks, he just wanted to see the ranking. The other day, I was searching for an open NOC page that I knew existed but couldn’t remember the search terms. Eventually I gave up, but I’m 90% sure I left the tab open to a random promising search result that had nothing to do with what I was really searching for. There’s a pdf that archive.org fought over and simply mentioning it results in a DCMA, you can find it now, but for nearly 20 years, you could only find rumors of it on the internet and a paper copy was the only way you could read it.
Even when I know what I’m looking for exactly, I sometimes open a bunch of tabs to search results and check all of them, (This is actually the vast majority of my non-mobile searches) especially because the search results are often wrong or miss some important caveats — especially searching for error messages.
The only way you could find out these searches were unsuccessful (or successful) is to ask. There’s no magic metrics to track that will tell you whether or not my personal experience found the search successful.
Result? Adsense-based websites started jamming in more ads per page to maintain their old revenue levels. Pages became longer so that more ads could be thrown in.
After going through some random archived posts from 2011 & 2016 , I think it probably fell into the same trap the article mentioned and kind of proves how needless seo spam ruins websites.
[1] is a link to a recipe on the same site from back in 2011. It has some content at the top giving personal context and plenty of normal pictures of actual recipe, not those fancy artistic photos. It has that personal touch with no hidden agenda type feel.
[2] is a link to another recipe from 2016. The content and format is more or less same as 2011 with a bit more long form content.
Compare that with current posts on the site. The content looks similar but there is a lot of needless use of bold/emphasised content probably for seo. Every paragraph is worded like it has some call to action or has an agenda.
[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20120109080425/http://cookieandk...
[2]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160108100019/http://cookieandk...
The problem is that Google forces actual good cooks to make their recipes look like worthless blogspam, but a good original recipe is not actually worthless blogspam, even when disguised in the way Google requires.
The idea that every website or tool with lots of visitors should be monetized is sad.
Original author made a tool, why do you have to make money on it?
Perhaps it sad that websites without ads aren't ranked higher.
Also web hosting doesn't cost much when your website is well made with some frugality in mind.
And there are also better, cleaner ways to make money on the internet: getting rid of the ads and spam and having the content accessible to paid members.
I am somewhat curious to hear more about the better and cleaner ways to make money on the internet, but I have a suspicion that in some circumstances (such as recipes) they may put you at a competitive disadvantage. I certainly have no desire to pay to access recipes I find via Google searches.
Detect sales/commercial language and structure,* and specifically target that for removal from results as if sales-oriented sites were hardcore porn and the child safety filter is turned on.
*Buy and cart buttons/functions, tables containing prices with descriptions but don't look like long-form reviews (which would be it's own filterable tag), etc, and domains trying to obfuscate are blacklisted permanently.
But lots of recipe sites now have a "jump to recipe" link at the top, so they've realised the junk is annoying for some fraction of their users. Although page junk is a pain, shortcuts for low-tolerance users seems like a good compromise.
Enough has to be enough!
I checked four recipes. One was a joke made out of genital references. Three began with near identical “embark on a journey of flavour” pseudo-SEO bullshit.
This is a strange complaint. You're visiting the blog of a woman who writes about cooking. Can't speak to the ads (I block them), but her site looks pretty good. Why do you think she should list her recipe like some kind of index? Perhaps she blogs for her own enjoyment, not for yours?
Have you ever read popular cook books? They aren't simply listings of ingredients, either.
Edit: real cookbooks was basically my answer to this problem to be honest. Some of them actually have fun stories in them. Most of them have a standard-ish "recipe on one page, photo on the opposite page" format. But none of them have promo codes for shoes, supplements, or terrible Canadian coffee chains in them.
Or, put your simplified recipes in a binder near the kitchen
Anything to avoid going to google to find a recipe
Think whatever you want of the ad industry, but Google flipping on that every year changes the project roadmap for every competitor in the adtech world. And when they flip again mid-year, it can invalidate months of work that teams have done.
In the end, all adtech companies are happy to see third-party cookies survive, so no one complains when Google backs out of killing them, but the point is that Google’s decisions change the project roadmaps for every competitor because no one is actually competing with Google. They have entirely too much control over the way the internet runs.
The definition of monopoly is not 100% market share.
> but it isn't a monopoly!!!11
Source?
As far as I know you will need to put banners so users know you accept donations (as OP accepts donations in their support page and you literally missed that), and most people don't donate, so what tends to happen is you replace banners that everyone hates but that pays money with banners that everyone hates that don't pay money.
Also, people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
Also, the OP DOES NOT have a support page linked on the original, or meme page of apportionmentcalculator.com. Don't know why you're giving me snark when it seems you yourself didn't even look at their site.
https://theluddite.org/#!support
I think I saw a banner when I scrolled to the bottom as well, but it isn't showing again for some reason.
I assume that they already had this page before they chose to monetize with adsense, which kind of implies that asking for donations hasn't been very effective for OP.
>people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
I disagree. Do you want to know what my hot take is?
Imagine, for one moment, that we didn't have ads on the internet.
Instead, every page was full of banners begging for donations.
Instead of ad-blockers, everyone would be using donation-blockers.
All that "concern" I keep hearing about about privacy and tracking and long lists of partners in cookie banners would disappear in an instant, and everyone would show that what they really care about is just being mildly inconvenienced by distracting banners telling you to do things and nothing more.
That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.
As for your hot take, I see no reason why I should take that seriously. Plenty of contribution requests exist today and have not been blocked, and they seem to drive okay conversation. Ads and contributions are not the same, and different strategies will emphasize them differently.
I'd guess that'd be true so long as what replaces ads is also annoying/distracting/intrusive, misleading, a security/privacy risk, gets in people's way, and/or prevents them getting to what they requested/came for. Hopefully, something intended to replace ads wouldn't be any of those things.
Ideally the ads wouldn't be replaced with anything at all. It seems unlikely that we'll go back to how things were when people published content online because they just wanted to share something cool or useful with anyone who was interested, but maybe it'll get to the point where it's easy and affordable enough that publishing a table of data, or a recipe, or a simple calculator doesn't cost a person enough to justify worrying about ads or whatever replaces them.
Here we all are on this website after all, typing up comments without demanding payment from anyone and everyone who reads what we have to say or putting flashing ad banners on them. It doesn't cost us much to do it, so we do, without any profit motive.
Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix.
And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers.
And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.
Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.
I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls, but that's pretty far off.
I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.
the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others
Extra effort is just a negative. So is needing relatively large donations to overcome transaction fees.
i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)
Bonus question: ads with tracking cost X, ads without cost Y. In actual numbers tell me how much more X is worth. 2Y, 10Y, 100Y? (There are studies on this)
Also my memory suggests 3x. But I'll go check.
Top result says 2.6x from ftc.gov but is from last decade.
Another result says "Targeted ads are twice more effective as non-targeted ads, and retargeted display ads encourage 1000 percent more people to search for a product." In response to that, I will note that even if google could not discern the site content at all, that would only affect targeting and not retargeting. So that suggests 2x at most in this situation.
Ads, as long as they have not been banished from the world, should be viable in some form on a small useful site.
There are ideas about how to get rid of ads entirely, but I wanted to be more grounded to the current state of things for the purposes of that comment.
The craziest thing to me is that if you let Google manage the ads, it will create exactly the ad-infested website the article mentions, and that OP's website turned into, with vignettes and sliding ads from the bottom of the screen, and ads half the size of the screen above the fold. That isn't the result of the website's owner's hand. It's actually Google's autoads feature.
It's entirely possible that we have tons of people making websites that don't really know a lot technically, they just use Wordpress or something like that, and they add adsense and let Google manage it, and Google just does THIS every time. And if Google didn't have this autoads features, the entire web would have a lot less ads, because it's just more ads than a human being can manually place in a webpage every time.
I put some family recipes on my personal (mostly tech) blog under another category in my sidebar. Taking a verbatim couple words that should be reasonably unique from a recipe there doesn't show up in searches for it. I took a quick look at my traffic analytics and apart from myself, it gets an imperceptible (perhaps 1 or 2) unique visitors each week out of the average 500-ish. I'd imagine a few things are at play:
- most folks find my site looking for tech things, not recipes
- most websites have a "single theme" - I just don't want to follow that because it's mine and I have other interests :)
- I do not at all care how many people copy my recipe for grilled bread or whatnot.
- I also don't run pictures because I don't want to.
What I do care about is that I like the look of _my_ recipes when _I_ need them, much like the recipe sites that existed 10 or more years ago.
https://some-natalie.dev/recipes/grill-bread/ for easy grilled bread.
If there's any call to action here, please put some of your own recipes or hobby activities or game things or anything else on your site. You're an interesting whole human being and it's okay to be that (even if our search engine overlords don't reward that).
Nearly every single comment I remember seeing and thinking it sounded like GPT, and yet, had enough content to be not-GPT, and I figured I was being cranky.
Same vibe here except blatantly off-topic, and less content than the others
Curious what you make of their other posts
This is so true. I have tried to monetize my tools with ads quite a few times before, and the only way was to use Adsense. It's actually crazy how there is literally no quality alternative.
I have no clue how, they must be burning investors' money
Basically they are in the business of providing human curated targeting parameters instead of the algorithm based that Google supplies.
And they are hard to block as a site owner as they seem to constantly have new accounts.