As you may know, the global economic depression has hit the media hard, due in large part to the fact that ad rates are in the toilet. OSAlert is in the same boat. Despite the fact that we still have good advertisers, our income from advertising this year will only be a fraction of what it was last year. We probably won’t make enough to cover our costs. Other news sites, as they’ve seen revenue decrease, have responded with more, and more intrusive, advertising. We don’ t want to do that. We feel we have a covenant with our readers. If you’ll be respectful of our need to run ads, we’ll be respectful of your need to read the site without having ads shoved down your throat. Please read on, for more discussion of our ad “covenant,” and a plea for help, including a plea to all Adblock users to please unblock OSAlert.OSAlert is in an interesting situation, because our readers are so savvy. We realize that about 100% of our readers are capable of blocking our ads if they want to. About 60% of OSAlert readers use Firefox, and one of the most popular Firefox extensions is Adblock. I have Adblock installed on my Firefox, and I use it when I’m reading a web site with particularly annoying ads (like the ones congratulating me on my free iPod). Unfortunately, Adblock doesn’t allow you to easily block ads on just one website. You have to block all ads and then manually disable Adblock for each site. I wish it worked the other way around. I don’t want to deprive my favorite sites of ad views, but want to easily banish the ads from certain other sites that don’t respect me as a reader. But for OSAlert’ purposes, the way Adblock works now is fine. I would just like to plead with all Adblock-using OSAlert readers to please click on their Adblock icon and “disable on www.osnews.com.”
We work with a good ad broker called Techvertical, who also sell ads for O’Reilly and Betanews. They understand our commitment to avoid intrusive advertising, but they’re always getting pressure from advertisers to run bigger, flashier ads. They contacted me the other day to see if I would consider running an auto-expanding ad at the top. It’s a little more intrusive than I like, but I’ve considered giving it a try for a couple of days. If you see it (it will only be visible to US-based readers) please let me know in the comments whether it’s overboard. But rather than agonize over these issues privately, I’d like to open it up for a discussion with the readers. How do you feel about online advertising? Have we been doing a good job running ads that are on-topic and non-intrusive?
If you’re willing to help OSAlert during these tough times, there are a few things you can do that will help us directly, and most of them don’t require much effort:
- The more traffic we get, the better, so visit OSAlert often, read the articles, and participate in the conversation. Also, tell your friends about OSAlert, and submit OSAlert stories you like to Digg, Slashdot, etc.
- The more stories we publish, the higher our traffic is, so submit news items or even submit an article or product review. Contact us if you’re interested in writing or editing.
- If you’re using Adblock, disable it for osnews.com
- If you notice an ad on OSAlert that’s interesting to you, click on it. We don’t get paid per-click for most ads, but our advertisers closely monitor response rates. Click on the ad, and check out the site it links out to. That assures that we’ll keep the ad campaigns we have.
- If you know of a company that makes something that would appeal to OSAlert readers, encourge them to Advertise on OSAlert. Ad rates are very low right now.
- If you know of any other tech-related web site that receives healthy traffic but hasn’t been able to get good advertisers, have them contact us. We’d like to form a network of sites in order to have more sway with advertisers.
- Let us know if you have any other ideas for improving OSAlert.
Actually, by default Adblock Plus is a black-listing solution and doesn’t block advertisement at all. It’s only if you subscribe to one of the lists (e.g. EasyList) that you’ll have to white-list sites instead.
I stand corrected. But I would assume that most people install Adblock with one of the standard blacklists, because using Adblock “raw” and trying to block the servers of intrusive ads one by one is a bit like whack-a-mole.
Forgot to mention: White-listed
Done
Didn’t you offer paid subscriptions some time ago? What happened to that? Maybe that would help to pay for the site.
I’m not sure I would pay for osnews, really. I do pay for lwn.net, but that site is still quite a bit better, honestly.
But yes, I’ve killed konquerors ad blocking — I would hate for osnews to disappear, since it _is_ one of my favourites.
I have to agree with you. The focus of osnews has really changed over the past few years and it’s simply not as interesting to me; I wouldn’t pay for a subscription. Most of the stuff that I do find interesting is on page 2 and doesn’t get much attention.
That said, I realize the content is determined by the people writing the content, so I’m not going to bitch about it. Maybe they’re getting more traffic with the new focus? I have no idea.
We still officially have the membership, but we haven’t updated the design of the Ad-free OSAlert site in a while, so it’s lacking in functionality. At most, we had less than 200 members, so it was a nice way for people to support the site, but the effort that it would take to bring it up to date probably isn’t worth the benefit.
It’s worth noting, though, that subscribers do get ad-free pages and enjoy a slew of other features, such as additional HTML in their bios, non-“no follow” links to their sites, access to an “ignore list”, and several other things I can enumerate if people are interested.
I’m glad you mentioned that – I was starting to think I was being wierd to subscribe. I really don’t do it to block ads, but just to help the site. I beleive in paying for stuff I use – I’ve purchased box sets of Redhat (when it was still a desktop-oriented OS), Mandriva, even Ubuntu at Best Buy. All of these I could also download (and usually already had), but I like to support products I use. I use OSAlert daily. You could even make the ads show up, I wouldn’t care. Of course, I do want you to continue to put 25,986,385.0 for my average comment score. It makes me feel important…
What they do on WHT is put a “Premium Member” stamp next to the avatar of the folks. The premium members also have access to restricted parts of the forum. OSN might wanna try that to give more incentive to upgrade.
I will make sure to shut off Adblock plus on OSAlert from now on.
I do not use Adblock at all. If a site becomes so full of ads it becomes annoying I stop using it. OSAlert in this regard isn’t annoying at all.
What I don’t like is what I perceive as traffic increase articles. This is not Slashdot. If it some day becomes slashdot and we get more idle articles than OS news(sic) we might leave for /.
I don’t know if my example is a common one, but here is how I choose if I block ads or not on a website:
-I hate when ads are animated. It just catches your attention and distract you from reading the content. I prefer to look at the ads when I want, I don’t need them to be screaming “heyyyy LOOOK AT MEEEEE”. So no gif, no flash
-I want to save my laptop battery life. Flash ads are a pain in the where you know, it just uses tons of CPU for nothing (see previous point).
-I hate ads appearing in a layer above the content. As I said before, I can look at ads by myself when I want, no need to throw them in my face all the time.
So far OSAlert is doing good when it comes to ads. However, would you change any of the previous “rules”, i will be tempted to change my Adblock settings for sure. That’s how I decide.
It’s the same for me. I used to view the ads on osnews. And then some of them started to become flash ads or blinking ads. As a result I blocked it.
If I get a promise there will never be flash ads or blinking ads I will unblock it.
Edit: I unblocked it to see what was there now, and there was actually an rather javascript-heavy ad. That’s just totally unacceptable as well. There is no reason for such nonsense. The next ad was a scrolling flash ad. Result: blocked ads again.
Edited 2009-05-13 18:32 UTC
I would rather at the bottom of each article have links to suggested products like how they are on Google. So if the article is on Windows Server there is a link that says, “Interested in purchasing an Admin Book” with a link, or “Interested in a quote on a Windows Server”, etc. Right before the button for Read More and Comments. I may actually click on those things where even if Ads show I am trained to block them out. If I read an article however and I’m interested I find I actually go to Google to find more information. Why not just provide the same thing for me to products?
Before I do what you suggest.
Same here. I know someone who has a large Linux blog, and his expenses are none. He has a free domain name from his webhosting company, and his hosting is paid through donations. No expenses, and still, he runs ads on his web site.
It’s not only about expenses. The web has grown a lot from the early “everything free” days. The quality has improved considerably and a lot more attention/time is being devoted to the preparation of articles (although not for everyone, and even if cms make life easier), such that I get a lot from surfing on the internet. It’s fun, informative, allows me to socialise…etc
Meaning that all the content does have a value, what’s wrong with contributing a little back if you can? That will provide better incentive and might increase the quality. If it doesn’t, stop visiting or stop paying (if it is subscription-based).
And ads aren’t really so evil, if they are respectful of my computing environment (screen space, bandwidth..etc), after all don’t we have ads on other forms of media like TV or Newspapers?
The time/expertise spent on preparation of the material
for OSAlert can be considered an expense. I’ll grant you that.
However, I want to know what that expense is before I
pay it. Transparency…..
Transparency about what? I mean does any reader invest in this site? No.
Sure you see ads, but you also have access to articles. It is all about give and take. If you feel the deal is not fair – i.e. Articles are of poor quality or Advertisement overly intrusive, you can either speak your mind (to the OSAlert staff) or leave.
It is like buying a chocolate. Is the chocolate tasty or nutritive enough for me to pay for it? You decide.
It might be appreciable that OSAlert provide details about their expenses, but, personally, I do not feel there should be any liability whatsoever in this regard.
And, personally again, I am here, despite also being a reader of other blogs/sites, because OSAlert provides me with things I need and enjoy, not because I am doing them any favour.
If I read the original poster correctly,
I am being asked to read ads with no questions
asked.
How do I know it does not cost $50/year to run OSAlert?
I want someone to spell it out. If it is expensive,
I don’t mind reading a few ads if it will help.
as a comparison, I run ww.linux-noob.com, a very small linux site aimed at linux noobs, and it costs me money, hence the ads.
1. the domain name has to be paid for (not free)
2. the hosting has to be paid for (via leaseweb in amsterdam), again, not free
3. the ad revenue does not cover the cost of #2 above, let alone #1.
as a result, the site is losing me money but I’m willing to do that because I use and like linux and hope it somehow helps others
I’m sure there are others out there who are in a similar situation, the website(s) I run are not my day to day business, but more of a hobby, however OSAlert.com is most likely the day to day business and therefore must be profitable in order to be useful to the owner,
I don’t use adblock on this or any website, I just put up with the annoying ads..
cheers
anyweb
Ok great, I know there is a cost. So what is the cost of said domain name registration and hosting ?
I use adblock since ads
start eating my cpu
with all the “flash” garbage.
I want to know what I am paying for.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433
That will take care of irritating flash ads.
done!
I’ve never had a problem with the ads on this site. It’s one of the reasons I love this site. They’re there, but they don’t interrupt me. I’ve always prefered light text ads and small or banner non-animated ads. I can’t say I’d be too terribly thrilled about anything that “auto expands” itself, although I may be misunderstanding that.
Frankly, I don’t use any kind of ad blocking software. I value a website who respects their readers, and I respect the owner of the site to put upon the site ads for revenue. However, if a site becomes so heavily overdone in ads, instead of blocking them, I completely stop visiting the site. I’d rather spend my time elsewhere where I can go straight to what I need in a nice streamlined manner, than have to click an ad off that’s hovering over what I want to read.
Does anyone know how to permanently release OSN on Adsweep? I’m afraid the next update will erase my custom settings…
If you want me to view your ads, it would be helpful if they didn’t require JavaScript… I have very little interest in adding a bunch of ad servers to my NoScript whitelist.
(Also, the giant animated Harley Davidson ad is both apropos of nothing and annoying. Animated ads can die in a fire.)
We’re working on this. I’m hoping we can implement an iframe-based solution soon.
Ditto that.
i’ll start by saying that i make a point of blocking ads at home, no matter what.
when i browse from work (which is when i read osnews most often) i do not block ads completely, only pop-ups.
that being said…
it’s *never* acceptable for an ad to:
– stream video (or audio of any sort) without viewer authorization. especially considering the looming threat of bandwidth caps all over the place. i realize that video-based ads really don’t use *tons* of bandwidth… but, for people with low limits, every kilobyte counts. period. not to mention, it’s distracting and annoying. which is sort of the point, probably.
– visually obscure the content the viewer is trying to access. if i have to click it away, i usually just leave the website.
– flash and blink, or physically move around the screen. no matter how relevant an ad is, if it’s blinking, it’s taking my concentration away from what i’m trying to read.
keeping it simple and relevant works wonders. right now, the unobtrusive System76 ads on this page are not bothering me at all, for example.
edit: just remembered another doozy… i really hate those ads masquerading as hyperlinks that give a little pop-up when you hover over them. so freaking annoying.
Edited 2009-05-12 18:02 UTC
Delivering none javascript based ads will
increase the amount of served ads as well.
i use noscript without any intention to harm your business, but i never allow off-domain js to be executed.
serving osnews.com based js ads or none js e.g. gif/img ads should do the trick.
— maybe you could reroute a subdomain to adtechus.com.
Uh oh. This sounds like the advertising companies start to realize putting a few flashy pictures on community sites doesn’t solve the age-old problem of getting a user’s attention. How do they measure their success? By counting downloaded images/flashs?
Now, how about another round in this arm’s race? Craft a plugin which downloads the imagery, but doesn’t show it to the user. Advertising companies will see their downloads rising again, users will stay happy as well.
Adblock is dead, long live Adhide.
P.S.: Please don’t tell the advertisers.
Edited 2009-05-12 17:55 UTC
Where can i delete and permanently disable my account?
Enough of this? The one post was too much for you?
I will happily suspend your account if you’d prefer. This is a community, some people are willing to chip in to assist.
Yes, please do so.
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Well said!
wow, are you the same person who avoids driving around populated areas because of the billboard ads “in your face”?
If Internet advertising was used on billboards, there would be a lot more car crashes that^aEURTMs for sure. Billboards are static, ne.
Thats true, but some areas have the huge displays for advertising (I know here in Rochester, NY they do), so it is all around in effect, and im sure as time goes on all forms of advertisement will become more “animated”.
There was bound to be at least one. Perhaps I’m just getting too cynical, but the first thought that occurred to me while reading the article was “how long will it take before some armchair webmaster starts whining self-righteously in the comments?”
Maybe he’d be happier over at ArsTechnica, where blocking ads is grounds for account deletion (even for paying subscribers). Which I feel obligated to point out, having posted a few unfavourable comparisons between OSAlert and Ars in the past.
I don’t understand why people are so selfish and awkward at the same time…That’s beyond me.
Maybe you can encourage contributions to the site. Personally I would like to see contributors exposed to less advertising.
How about adding an unobtrusive link for donations and giving some form of recognition to contributors. Maybe a custom avatar or a star next to their name for symbolic recognition. Maybe add a contributors page or some other way of recognising them…. you decide what works for the site.
I love OS news and really don’t want to see it disappear any time soon. But I doubt I will stop blocking adds.
Edited 2009-05-12 18:11 UTC
I am so accustomed to an ad-free internet. I just cannot stand _any_ ads. I even use the “hide elements” adblock extension to block DIVs that mean nothing to me for the sites I visit often (safes bandwidth for everybody
)
I think it is better to tell you the truth that I won’t disable my adblocker for anybody. What I will do is digg OSAlert content etc.
I would accept a LWN.NET-like model where you pay for early access. LWN.NET seems to have no problems at the moment.
I think in this “crisis” a lot of sites without good content will just die. Only the most successful and dedicated will survive, but I don’t think web will be poorer once the “crisis” is over. Just a little natural selection
How much does it cost to run this website? Here in Germany hosting/bandwidth is dirt cheap. Maybe you should switch hosters. Or isn’t hosting the biggest cost?
Many hosting companies want to host web sites like OSAlert for free, just for public relations. I’m sure OSAlert is no exception. I wonder what other expenses there are. Not staff, that we know, because Thom and others work on their free time on a volunteer basis.
I don’t want to give anyone the impression that OSAlert is in danger of ceasing publication. We do pay for a hosted webserver and we keep a sysadmin on retainer to help with managing it and keeping it running smoothly. We’re paying less than the industry average for those services. most OSAlert content and labor is provided by volunteers, though we usually have a budget for our key contributors to get new computers and other hardware from time to time, as well as cover travel expenses to conferences and communication expenses. We would also like to be able to compensate the contributors of feature articles. Having our revenue dry up won’t make us take OSAlert offline. I’ll pay the hosting out of my own pocket if I need to. But it will make us have to scale back our plans for expanding our original articles, and make us unable to reward major contributors with the modest payment or hardware perks we’d like to.
I’d prefer to keep OSAlert free and not ask for donations. But we hope to have some t-shirts and other merchandise we can sell soon to allow people to support the site directly.
A “store” section with books on operating systems, programming, sysadmin, as well as CD-ROMs of the latest Linux distros + t-shirts and stuff…It you sell valuable products, I would surely buy. Don’t sell junk, like some other sites.
I’d but NetBSD t-shirts from OSAlert.
Or OSAlert t-shirts
The gear you see from cafe press such as mugs and t-shirts look gimmicky. I wouldn’t be encouraged to purchase such things.
I would prefer to make small donations on an annual basis. Alternatively I might buy a more valuable item such as a book or CD if it directly supported the site.
I would buy a t-shirt if offered.
Me too! Maybe they should do a poll to see how people would be stimulated to donate and/or pay.
What would you like us to do?
[ ] Have a bunch of t-shirts up for sale!
[ ] Have us use intrusive well paying ads (flash)
[ ] Have us use more less-intrusive less-paying ads (no flash)
[ ] Have a Donate-to-us button on the site
[ ] …
Does anyone have some nice idea’s?
I am regretting the decision right now but it’s done. The page also loads 5 times slower….
I agree, this is one of the first things I noticed as well. Interestingly enough, while the new and improved JavaScript engines help with calculations on loaded pages or with DOM manipulation, blocking unnecessary content still improves page loading and therefore the browsing experience far more noticeably.
As as Mac user another reason I use Adblock Plus is a purely technical one: The Mac version of Firefox has abyssal drawing speed and it’s massively impeded by active content like embedded objects (Flash, Quicktime, etc.) but also by many graphics. I’ve experienced scrolling slow down to a crawl on certain sites where I choose to deactivate ADP. Unfortunately Firefox 3.5 makes the situation worse by introducing pixel scrolling. It’s just something to consider as too many Flash ads will simply force me to block them as sites become unusable.
Oeps… needs to unblock this site over multiple machines and operating systems…
Except for the auto-blooking by my work, I’ll turn it off at home.
Same for me.
Just unblocked ads here and found rendering and scrolling slowed down significantly on this little netbook. And having two big _animated_ ads on each page from a company whose products don’t interest me is just too annoying for words. So unfortunately my answer is no, I won’t unblock osnews.com ads as long as they are of the animated variety. Surely there are lots of other people who won’t feel the same, but there ya have one opinion.
So this leads to the obvious question, does Osnews still want visitors here that aren’t interested in ads? Or would you rather I (we?) just go away?
We still want you, and understand that there are valid usability reasons for wanting adblock. The most important thing you can do to support OSAlert is to read and participate. If you need to block the ads, hopefully some of the other ideas we’re cooking up can help you support OSAlert in other ways. But for now, read, submit stories, comment, and try not to flame people too much.
Surely there is some sort of browser extension or something that gets the ads but does not display them? There is exactly one site that I visit with ads that are tasteful enough to persuade me to lower my shields, and that’s lwn.net. OSAlert.com’s ads are already too annoying for words, and my guess is that is only going to get worse.
Edited 2009-05-12 19:18 UTC
Done, Actually I switched from FF to IE8, so no adblock here.
Sorry, but I cannot and will not consume ads in any capacity, to the degree that I have any control over it. Hell, I don’t even subscribe to cable.
That being said, if you guys were to put up something that states how much you need, and how much a reader would need to donate so that you can pay your expenses, based on how many subscribers you have (or whatever), I’d probably pitch in, depending on how much you need.
I mean, I wouldn’t pay $20 a year, but I might pitch in a dollar or two anually. On the other hand, I might be persuaded to throw in $10 if you guys added the ability to filter by topic, or at the very least, drop the ‘page 2’ bullshit.
personally I enjoy Page 2 and wish it linked to more stories.
One of your top two gripes is the page 2 box’s existance?
Page 2 _is_ a peeve of several of us. The separation is ridiculously arbitrary for casual readers: discussion possibility and incident of interesting material aren’t much different between the two sets of articles, only the article writeup length (or perhaps effort).
Maybe it makes sense to editors, but not to readers. It just means more feeds to shuffle or pages to check.
Page 2 stories are just a teaser with no context, page 1 stories all include a “read more” with additional and editorial insight.
What about that is difficult? I’m being serious. I’ve heard nothing but good feedback until right now.
Edited 2009-05-12 19:51 UTC
Difficult? I don’t care for the reason of separation.
Except for reviews and critiques (not the articles that end with a third of a page of Thom telling us how his last date went), extended articles don’t interest me.
Not that I’d be happy if OSAlert became nothing but an aggregator; don’t get me wrong. The distinction between “editorialized” and “linked” feels artificial because I think of OSAlert’ main service as linking to niche stories with the possibility of informed discussion — especially with staff — not for writeups on warp drive, wooden macbooks, or bad prognosticating on 2012. I have to mention that I hardly read Ars Technica’s prolific reams of barely-to-almost tech-related blurbs at all now, while I used to eat up their densest pieces with joy. So, I think there’s a trend here that may be relevent, but I don’t know where on the curve everybody falls to compare them.
And I guess that’s the crux of it. If I had to make one suggestion for improvement, it would be for the staff to try to transfer some of that writeup energy into comments, even if it feels like an essay unto itself; then combining Page 2 with the Front Page would be more palatable. But maybe I’m just being stubborn about the changes.
Right, I’m saying do away with page 2 entirely, or else switch them around, cuz as another poster pointed out, the more interesting articles are usually on page 2. OSAlert has always been one of the sites I go to in order to keep up with tech, not to read editorials.
http://osnews.com/page2
I guess you’re arguing that defaults don’t matter?
I mean, it shouldn’t be surprising that front page articles get way more attention than page 2 articles. For most visitors, page 2 is a list of links like a blogroll or something that a lot of people just filter out.
I guess what bugs me about the split though is that the distinction that you’re using (read more content) is really not a very good one. Just now, Thom posted about the new minor release of Mac OS X 10.5. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s most definitely OS news. But… it’s really not the most interesting article. It’s a minor release with a few bug fixes. Almost any article in page 2 right now is more interesting and would lead to more discussion.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that putting 10.5.7 on the front page because Thom summarized the changes is dumb when you have so much more interesting content in page 2 that no one ever goes to.
Our figures beg to differ. Page 2 items aren’t getting that many less pageviews than page 1 items. It used to be they got less, surely, when it was all new. But as time progresses, and people get used to page 2, the differences in page views start to disappear. Most of our readers come in via RSS anyway, and they don’t even encounter the difference between 1/2.
The problem with the term “interesting” is that it’s subjective, and a completely pointless characteristic. To a Mac user, the release of 10.5.7 is interesting and front-page worthy – for someone without a Mac, it is not, and they’d rather have it on page 2.
We decided to set a very simple divide: long vs. short. OSAlert is an open site, so if you want certain items on the front page, feel free to help us out and submit long items! It’s really that simple.
What the few people (trust me, you guys make up less than 0.1% of our readers) complaining about page 2 don’t realise, is that OSAlert is going through a transition, which we announced earlier:
http://www.osnews.com/story/20693/OSAlert_Clean_Slate
We are transitioning from a single editor site to a multiple editor site. Our dream is to have multiple editors producing multiple long items every day.
I’m trying my very best to get as many different topics covered with long items, but sadly, I’m simply not knowledgeable enough to cover every subject in an in-depth fashion.
So, to prevent lots of stuff from not being covered, we made sure we could still publish “old style” short items, and we have done so in a way that they are STILL on the frontpage. To further improve things, I came up with the tabbed design we feature now, so that you can even have page 2 items in all their glory.
Our current setup is not “done”, we are working towards a larger goal. I have a vision of where OSAlert needs to go, and I’ve gotten all the team members’ noses to point in the same direction. The changes we underwent since the start of this year have re-invigorated OSAlert on almost every level – from number of visitors, to number of comments, to comment quality, to story quality, to number of items, and to actual site features.
Not everyone might see the progress we’ve made, but please bear with us. We are not just throwing things around or making arbitrary changes – it’s all part of a very carefully crafted and thoroughly debated plan.
And we’re ahead of schedule, and I’m proud of that.
I’m confused: are you arguing that the method of splitting page 1/page 2 is wrong or that the author’s categorization is wrong? You can’t say the distinction (the default) is the problem and then say that Thom has categorized the items wrong, because those two things are contradictory.
…maybe you’re just saying we’re wrong, regardless of reasons?
Let’s say I average about 20 pageviews a week. How much would I earn you in ad revinue annually? I can’t imagine it’d be more than a few dollars, and I’d be happy to donate that – maybe in exchange for no ads?
I used to disagree with ad-block since I wouldn’t be paying for websites.
I started using ad-block because some common websites I went to put expanding ads on them that prevented me from reading their stories.
I did not know you could white list websites, thanks for that info, and for it you are white-listed.
I recall paying for membership at one point; I notice that I get ads now, so I assume that it expired. I saw no notice, however. It’s no wonder that the number of subscriptions is small if there’s no attempt at retention.
You have or had a deal with Amazon for buying books (and other products?) through the site for a small cut. If that’s the case, make that a permanent part of the site and remind folks now and again (putting it somewhere high on the first page — “above the fold” as they say in the newspaper business — would suffice. I suggested this privately to someone before (probably Adam or Thom) and the response was they didn’t want to do anything quite that high profile, and wanted to use it only when doing an article on a book. I’d prefer it to a lot of extra adware and articles such as this, however.
Seriously, I know a group of several hundred people who would visit this site the instant she is gone.
Personally I wish she did more. I love watching her make people have seizures. Even when I disagree with her, I respect her having really firm opinions.
Adds a little hotsauce to what can sometimes be a kind of bland subject.
I miss her rants about operating systems. She is cool. But now Thom is more or less the replacement. The things he now writes are very Eugenia-espe. (The OS stuff, I am not talking about religilous sci-fi)
I’d like to add my appreciation for Thom’s great work so far. OSAlert is not my main source of news but his professionalism and dedication are the reason I read the sit and its feed.
nda
I doubt you know “several hundred people” who would leave the site if she did.
Also, requesting that she is fired is lame. I often don’t agree with her but not even I would be as lame as to request that.
I doubt you know “several hundred people” who would leave the site if she did.
Also, requesting that she is fired is lame. I often don’t agree with her but not even I would be as lame as to request that.
I work for a major advertising technology vendor specializing in “rich media ads”
Here’s some things:
* Most decent sites are quite selective of the type of ads they run. Heck, we are, since we have to pay for bandwidth, and we charge out the wazoo, so its hard for an annoying ad to run in the first place.
* If an ad truly sucks, contact the publisher (the website) and complain. If the publisher complains, it will be pulled. If I get the message, I’ll pass it on so that the advertiser knows its annoying.
* Sites are almost paid on a CPM basis.
* Best way to avoid annoying ads: use Opera or Linux. Most of the really annoying ones won’t work!
Done! I love this site, I learn something here everyday.
“There are levels of survival we are willing to accept” Hate to quote a so-so movie, and I don’t have an answer for your income issues. But until advertisers learn that screaming at customers, or carpet bombing customers with ads, or having all this goofy flashy junk all over the web page(this site perhaps an exception) there will be absolutely no way I can put up with whatever the internet has become.
I guess web sites have no control over what their sponsors can put up on a site as an ad, but seriously would it be too much to ask to have just a simple link to a sponsor.
Hate to put this site in jeopardy, really I do, but between popups, popdowners, flyovers, scootups, epileptic seizure ads, and everything else, advertisers just get more and more clueless every year.
I realize this web site is much better that most, and mostly I am just venting but seriously the ad world must be populated by a bunch of complete idiots. If I go to a site and I see something I want to buy, I click. If I don’t want it there’s nothing that will get me to buy it.
Stepping off of soap box. Nothing to see here move along.
Love the site. Ignore everything I said please.
Lurking since 2002
Well, out of interest, how much does it cost annually to run this site, and how much of that is hosting fees (as distinct from any other costs you may have)? And divided by your users, now much is each user costing you per year? I realize this may be a sensitive matter you can’t or don’t want to answer – in that case, fine, no problems. But a figure in hard green dollars usually helps to put things in perspective for most people whereas talk of an ad here or an ad there doesn’t really mean anything, so folks tend not to respond helpfully.
If someone is told “each user of this site costs us $25 per year”, for example, at least they have a target to aim at.
Well, my download speed is crippled at the moment (damned Australian ISPs), so I won’t be disabling Adblock at the moment. At 64kbps, Adblock makes the difference of more than a whole minute in loading light texty pages like OSAlert. When my download speed is uncapped (back to the glory of 10mbps! Yeah, the transition hurts…) I’ll disable it on OSAlert. Congrats, you’re getting special treatment
. I’m using Windows at the moment, and I really don’t trust any advertisers at all. No offense, but I don’t actually know any of the admins of OSAlert, so it means squat to me if you trust them.
I use neither AdBlock nor NoScript because for me that’s part of the web experience. If I find things overly intrusive, I won’t come again, the web’s quite vast. If I really need the site, I might bear with it temporarily (using remove anything extension).
Sometimes I do find ads interesting, though not often, due to my geo-location, and somehow I do wish there were better targetted ads for me – who knows I might actually find something useful (isn’t it what surfing is about?).
As for subscription, I honestly wouldn’t mind to pay to view OSAlert (depends on how much) although I am not really in a position to do so, being a student on a tight budget. When I get a job I don’t see why this would be a problem, after all ain’t I here time and again ’cause I love it?
Do you know of a way to whitelist sites in opera?
It’s not so much white-list as “don’t blacklist”, for Opera.
If you go into the Block Content dialogue, and then “Details”, you should be able to see the sites from where ads come. Just delete the blocks and you’re golden.
…of course, you’ll see ads from the same servers on other websites that use the same ad-servers, but that’s all you can do in Opera.
To where I don’t comment much I do enjoy this site. Your ads also are not the obscene, in your face, suck up the bandwidth ads that makes Adblock a necessity.
Thank you and Adblock is turned off.
Cheers
AdBlock Off. Cheers.
I don’t usually block ads. For one, I use Opera and their content-blocker is pretty low-feature, but for two, I don’t want to deprive you of cash.
If it’s a site I don’t care about (msnbc.com) and an ad I hate (those ads that have the woman comparing her belly before and after *shudder*) I will not hesitate to block that specific ad. Hopefully, my behaviour in a very little way encourages ad-people NOT to serve those ads.
But around here, I’ve never been bothered by the ads because you don’t run bothersome ads. So I’ll keep not blocking ads here.
RSS feeds could be one reason people are browsing osnews less. I know that I have started using the google reader a lot in the last year, and maybe a lot of other people have switched to using readers as well.
If it would help, I wouldn’t mind having simple banner ads at the bottom of RSS articles.
Ads are annoying. I probably won’t unblock them. But if you had a “tip jar” sort of thing were I could easily pop in $5, I would. I don’t want a subscription; I don’t want a tax deduction.
If I popped in $5 with no expectation of anything in return, how would that $5 compare to what you’d make on ads?
I think one problem with this whole idea is the “patron” concept on the Internet is half-developed, unfortunately.
A contribution to osnews.com wouldn’t exactly be a donation as this isn’t a charity, and it wouldn’t be a subscription fee as it would be voluntary.
I, for one, look forward to seeing some kind of middle ground of “patron” become the norm for everything on the Internet, where I can drop bits of money in buckets whenever I see anything of particular interest or insight. It’d be great to have buttons built into mp3 players for this purpose as a way of compensating artists.
For now though, I will turn off adblock. This is the only site I will do this for, or have done it for, in years.
Thanks to the contributions of everyone involved with osnews.com, even those of you whose opinions I’m not necessarily huge fans of. Gives me something to think about anyway.
If you can figure out some way of putting a “contribute” something button somewhere (along the lines of what I describe above), I’d be willing to do that as well since I’ve been reading for years.
Edited 2009-05-13 02:30 UTC
I have adblock plus installed and subscribed to one of the lists. Previous to that I was blocking ads manually when the really annoying pop out of the screen ones would show up. I have now disabled the blocking for osnews.com. I didn’t realize you could unblock them on a site by site basis otherwise I would have done it a long time ago. Its the least I could do for you guys. I don’t remember OSAlert ever having the annoying ads, although there was that one Intel one where you can select what type of customized computer you wanted.
I never use adblock or flash blocker unless I am using my mobile broadband – to save my bandwidth allowance and reduce download times.
OSAlert.com is probably better than most sites given that there is the cringe I experience when I read through such slashdot, neowin and other rags (filled with intellectual pygmies) – I come back to OSAlert and find that at least there is a level of discourse which is worth participating in.
OK, I turned Adblock off for osnews and now I see the ads, which translated to English are:
Madonna Q.I.=140(sic) Whats yours? [Begin test]
Brad Pitt I.Q.=XXX Whats yours? [Begin test]
etc
Maybe the ads could be more relevant? Please?
Depending on where you live, you might not get relevant ads. If you live in a geographical location where you’re getting worthless ads, I would have no understand completely if you continued to use adblock.
I would prefer the option to donate (and use AdBlock) or to get a subscription (without ads).
In general, I find the adds non-interesting and definitely not worth following. I can count the number of times I have clicked on an add in the last decade on one hand. They do annoy me (sometimes), especially the expanding or animated kind.
… have been lurking on this site for years without posting a comment (or registering). I do not mind paying for OSAlert, but rather not implicitly by watching adds.
You do realize that most sites (including this one probably) bills on CPM basis instead of a CPC basis? Clicking on the ad is irrelevant. The ad loading is.
CPM = Cost Per Thousand Impressions
CPC = Cost Per Click
i’m using the glimmerblocker.org proxy and i can’t figure out how to whitelist the ads from ad-networks for osnews. even using a higher priority for the whitelist rule, the ad-networks rules seem to overrule the whitelist. any suggestions?
I was well familiar with AdBlock long before I bothered to try it. Ads didn’t annoy me until my then-favourite message board site adopted Flash ads that blocked half of the web page for a certain time and you couldn’t do anything about it. Also some ad servers were very slow, and Firefox sometimes has problems rendering a single pixel of the page if some bitmap image isn’t loading up. Firefox 1.5 also didn’t autofill the login forms until the page was 100 % ready.
Webmasters should take the control of advertising to themselves and not just sign with some third party ad broker whose content cannot be filtered out in any way. Many times I’ve seen porn/adult and gambling ads on a “family-friendly” site due to this third party advertising.
These days I play safe and block pretty much everything that loads up from a different domain than the one I’ve myself typed in my web browser. The same goes on here OSAlert: no adserver.adtechus crap for me, thanks.
I have an allergy to ads.
I really think I do. Same for TV and bad movies. And pollen.
Seriously though, I don’t mind text ads or even the occasional interesting static or click-interaction-only ad.
I’m blocking OSAlert becasue I tried it without and it was.. painful.
There’s a web-IM service called Meebo that I use, they have ads that link to embedded video (you have to click on it for it to play). I usually would think this is lame (not annoying, just lame) except some of the video ads are actually kinda amusing. I still wouldn’t want them playing automatically, but at least it’s something, you know?
Also, I’ve been lurking via RSS for a while and never registered. I’ll try to be more active from now on.
I have an idea. Why don’t you have a selection on every registered user’s profile that lets THEM chose the types of ads they want to see?
Section 1:
what are your interests? (titanium eating utensils, power tools, flying monkeys, ruby..)
What are you really NOT interested in? (viagra, power wheels, goldfish, visual basic..)
Combine with context sensitive ads. If they don’t put anything in the boxes, nothing changes.
Section 2:
What kinds of ads do you prefer (choose at least one)?
Flash ads?
Attention grabbing audio ads?
Attention grabbing motion ads?
Javascript ads?
Click-to-expand ads?
Animated gif ads?
Static-Image ads?
Text-only ads?
Display only those types of ads selected. Default to all. Result: People won’t need to run adblock or flashblock to remove annoying ads, since ads will not be annoying to that person.
If this isn’t good enough, then they are going to block the ads anyway.
I will take the time to read text-only ads that interest me, and sometimes I will click through, and sometimes I will buy the product. But I will never click through an annoying ad.
Well I have added osnews to the exception on adblock and also to the whitelist on flashblock, but for some reason I still can’t see the ads. Flashblock is still blocking them.
Websites aren’t free, they are ad supported. Just because I am able to get it for free, doesn’t make it ethically right. If a website has ads that irritate me too much, I just don’t visit it.
Unfortunately, most peoples ethics are in direct correlation with their chance of being caught. There is no chance of being caught at this, which is why everyone who can does it.
Wow, had to read this twice to be sure I read it right. Just cause there’s an ad somewhere, I don’t need to look at it. If I chose to switch channel when there’s commercials, I don’t cheat anyone. Nor do I cheat anyone if I decide not to download advertisements when I visit a site. It’s my bandwidth and my CPU power. This has nothing to do with the ethics of the one being subjected to advertisements. Blame the ads that are bad, steal focus, scream loudly from your speakers or opens windows on your screen, and opens another once you close it.
I won’t disable my adblocker, or whitelist any sites, simply cause I don’t trust the ad firms to “keep it subtle” for very long. I’d much rather donate money to sites I enjoy and visit than subject my online experience to advertisements.
It’s your bandwidth and cpu, but it is consuming someone elses content. That content isn’t free, it is ad supported. By blocking the ads, you are taking their content for free, but not giving them anything in return. People aren’t forcing you to go to their sites, if they did then you would have a point. You are choosing to go to ad funded sites, and also choosing to circumvent the way they make money. Considering the margins per visit, you are costing them money by visiting them. So what entitles you to consume peoples content at their expense?
It is not like ads are the only option. http://contenture.com/ is a service where users pay a subscription, and sites get a per visit fee. You and people like you are ushering in that vision of the internet.
That’s just wrong. This site is free. They made a choice to add advertisements to help pay for hosting, bandwidth etc. They could have closed the site and offered memberships, or they could have added a donate button, or add whatever alternative here. But whatever they choose to do, they’ve so far kept the content free probably to keep the user base.
It seems that with your logic, visiting this site with a text-only browser is somehow being a leech. If that is so, I think that business model needs to be re-thunk – back to the drawing board and come up with something that doesn’t annoy the hell out of your visitors and potentially slowing down the site load times considerably, making the user experience a bad one.
I can’t figure out how to turn off adblocking for a single site using Camino. If anyone out there knows please let me know and I’d be happy to disable adblocking for osnews.com
done
I’m sorry, but I have a brain injury, and animated ads are just not workable for me… it’s very difficult for me to read the content when there’s crap blinking and dancing over in the margin. It’s either read without animated ads, or don’t read at all. I don’t really have any other choices here.
I’d be more than happy to look at your advertiser’s ads, but first, you’ll have to get some advertising that will hold still.
I’m sorry… my Adblock will have to stay on.
I can’t comment if OSAlert have been running ads that are on-topic and non-intrusive, never saw them in years. However I will unblock now at home, but at work the firewall is still filtering all that out which I have no control over.
Even with ads on I’m not likely to go for any of that. Participated in some focus group research for IBM about ten years ago and consistently avoided even looking at most ads, and did not click on one. They were trying all sorts of different banners, scroll-bys and stuff at the time, but I think I’ve just got an antipathy to commercialism wired into my brain that subconsciously makes me avoid everything that I did not come for, i.e the content.
So I guess I can deal with that on OSAlert if that helps the site.
Thanks all, and have a great day!