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[–]electrace 16 points17 points  (6 children)

Strange. I find the ads on Pandora far more annoying than the (largely ignorable) ads on a website.

[–]hippydipster -4 points-3 points  (5 children)

What ads? Oh right, I pay for premium :-) . Pandora rocks - way better than spotify IMO.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (3 children)

does pandora let you listen to specific songs/albums/playlists, or is their only offering the radio stations?

[–]hippydipster 12 points13 points  (0 children)

I can listen to any specific song/album I want and make playlists of them just like Spotify, and just like Spotify, some things are restricted to radio only because of licensing issues (like Tool, unfortunately, shows up on radio play but you can't play a Tool song by choice - same on Spotify I think).

My main reason for preferring Pandora is I like their radio function better than Spotify's. With spotify, it seems like every piece of information I add to a radio station restricts what I hear, and on Pandora, every piece of information I add to a radio station expands what I hear. So, on Spotify if I actually thumbed up /thumbed down stuff, every radio station I listened to converged to be basically a Faith No More station. Whereas on Pandora, I'm discovering new music a lot easier. Also it seems easier to share my pandora account with my family than Spotify was.

[–]electrace 4 points5 points  (1 child)

You pick a genre/artist/song, and it plays similar music. Then it pays attention to your upvotes/downvotes to try and figure out what you like.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Could you try Les Tambours de Bronx and e.g. Delirium for me? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2LINU3bt20 Pandora does not work in my country and I just cannot find any similar music. I find it super great. The feeling of metal, but still mostly rythmic, techno-like.

[–]vsyncmental blanking interval 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I pay for Pandora and they still spam me... to pay for Pandora

[–]RealJon 52 points53 points  (9 children)

I don't understand what point he's making. Ok, so if you remove the annoying thing that makes you money you get 10% more users - so what?

[–]Massim0g 73 points74 points  (0 children)

For websites (like his) where donations are a bigger revenue source than ads, the loss in userbase growth can cost a lot more than what ad revenue makes back.

[–]gwern 68 points69 points  (5 children)

Suppose there were a cancer drug which was used in almost all chemotherapy treatments worldwide for many decades, affecting scores of millions of people a year; suppose everyone believed it to have annoying yet ultimately minor side-effects (comparable to, say, aspirin & internal bleeding); but then, when someone finally gets around to testing it in several RCTs and looks at mortality, in addition to treating cancer quite effectively and reducing cancer deaths, it turns out this drug actually kills 10% of all patients via other side-effects (heart attacks, let's say).

For many patients, this is unfortunate news - nobody likes heart attacks - but they would still want to use this drug because their particular cancer is much more dangerous than the heart attacks.

But don't you think there might be quite a few patients/doctors whose decisions might change if they knew about the heart-attack thing?

[–]RealJon 28 points29 points  (2 children)

Nice, I get your point now :-)

My experience from large ad-financed internet companies is that the people making these decisions are well aware there is a cost in "engagement" from ads and actively try to balance it against short term revenue goals. Perhaps this knowledge just isn't widely disseminated, but also I haven't heard it expressed as crisply as "10-15%" before.

[–]Taleuntum 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Not really relevant to the topic, but while I read your comments I remembered some story about there being two devils of doubt in the mind of someone doing/discovering something, one whispers "It is not interesting." and the other whispers "It is already known/done.". But I can't remember where I read this and not being able to reference it bugs me. Do you or someone reading this maybe knows this text?

[–]Tropolist 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I've only heard this in the form of an academia joke: a young grad student sends off a paper for publication and it gets rejected. Reviewer 1 says "this proof follows trivially from the premises." Reviewer 2 says "this proof has already been published."

[–]gnramires 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I have some ideas regarding other funding methods for the Internet in general (not just particular websites) that isn't forceful advertisement. One I like would be some kind of ISP-Consumer regulation wherein it is mandated a certain fraction of subscription price go towards funding visited websites.

The algorithm for allocating funds (as a function of IPs and pages accessed) would be delicate, but it could be a result of some open effort, continually updated program. A general rule against exploiting e.g. artificially inflating access to your own websites or websites that give direct cash back (with punishments in the form of diverting the fee into taxes, temporarily ceasing donation flow) would be in place; repeated offense could have further fees, etc.. I believe that'd be generally sufficient to discourage blatant abuse, since it would require significant effort from the consumer (which are for the most part illeterate).

So websites would generally receive revenue automatically. A cryptographic mechanism could be easily setup to transfer cash from ISP-website.

Another idea is to put a fraction of this fee for free (if optional) allocation by users. So if they like a content creator in particular but don't spend too much time viewing his videos; or if a website wants to demand subscriptions because it has some fixed costs/user, the user would be able to subscribe without all hassles with payments, credit cards, etc. (part of the reason very few would subscribe to e.g. NYT online even if it cost only a few cents). This is extra exploitable, but I think again general regulation[1], some punishment fees, and a screening algorithm, plus the limited fraction of your contribution, would leave exploitation at a negligible level.

[1]: Not only forbidding direct cash returns, but also general-purpose donations e.g. to unrelated NGOs/charities (out of scope of the fee) -- it could be required the website produce some content for web consumption.

The benefit would be clear. Most websites could rid themselves of advertisements completely. Many websites could adopt mandatory subscriptions without too much hassle for the user. Donations for content creators would become much easier.

Thoughts, further ideas? Do you think this kind of system could plausibly get some traction?

Also, I need a catchy name :p

[–]synedraacus 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The ISPs don't have a good incentive to release correct traffic data; they may even be legally bound to not do that. Algorithm or not, someone will need to go and check if the access logs do indeed match the ISP report. Which implies storing logs, releasing these logs to random people and a bunch of other privacy violations.

[–]Felz 9 points10 points  (0 children)

The other thing that can make you money is content marketing, and it's far more pernicious. So… the takeaway is to do more of that I guess?

[–]technologyisnatural 12 points13 points  (0 children)

In many start-up spaces user/subscriber growth is everything. If you’re competing in such a space, this data tells you to turn on ads as late as possible. It’s yet another reason to seek VC funding rather than trying to bootstrap.

[–]Felz 19 points20 points  (17 children)

Is this controlled for adblockers? How would that affect the percentage of users who see the ads and are driven away?

[–]gwern 40 points41 points  (16 children)

In the 4 datapoints, adblockers are either irrelevant or taken into account:

  1. In the case of the LinkedIn mobile app, I believe there is no such thing as an adblocker because smartphones are so locked down, there is nothing you can install to tamper with the mobile app internals to remove the ads from their newsfeed (or if you can do such a thing, only a truly vanishingly small fraction of the 102 million users randomized in their A/B testing would've done so);
  2. for Pandora, there is no such thing as an audio streaming adblocker I've ever heard of, certainly nothing widely installed among the 34 million users randomized in their A/B test;
  3. for the Mozilla analysis, it is in-browser telemetry where the browser itself is phoning home, so both users with adblockers installed and those without one installed are equally well-covered (in fact, comparing adblock users with non-adblock users is the entire point of that analysis);
  4. and in the case of gwern.net, adblock users are simply invisible to the experiment (since they'd block both Google Analytics & AdSense), meaning that the measured effect is driven entirely by the non-adblock users' behavior changes and that if adblock were bypassed somehow such that 100% of users were exposed to ads, the effect would be even larger (and adjusting to get this hypothetical effect based on the known percentage of adblock users is where my 14% comes from).

[–]electrace 14 points15 points  (4 children)

for Pandora, there is no such thing as an audio streaming adblocker I've ever heard of, certainly nothing widely installed among the 34 million users randomized in their A/B test;

Not that it matters in this case, but pithos for linux automatically skips pandora adds.

[–]gwern 9 points10 points  (3 children)

Interesting. Do you know how they do that? Are ads sent separately in a very simple way or are they doing something more complex like fingerprinting music vs non-music and assuming that non-music==ads?

[–]electrace 6 points7 points  (2 children)

I can only guess. When I start up the program, I can see the first 4 songs that are going to be playing. It's a little strange that Pandora tells it's user (or API) that much information, given that on the Pandora site, it will only give you the current song playing.

But to me, the weird thing isn't ad identification, it's how pithos can skip the ads without Pandora noticing. Shouldn't Pandora be able to tell that my account is calling for the next song 30 seconds early?

edit: clarity

[–]YuriKlastalov 7 points8 points  (1 child)

They probably can, but proving that any given song skip call is intended to skip an ad is difficult to achieve without too many false positives. A Linux client probably doesn't even have enough users to make it worthwhile for Pandora to even bother.

[–]Deeppopu/Deeppop 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah my bet goes too on the fact that a 60s directionally correct impact analysis told them not to bother.

[–]skiff151 4 points5 points  (9 children)

I have Ublocker on my phone and it seems to work somewhat.

[–]gwern 9 points10 points  (8 children)

Ublocker seems to be a Chrome extension. Why do you think that would affect a custom mobile app like the LinkedIn app appears to be?

[–]how_to_choose_a_name 6 points7 points  (6 children)

If the chrome extension affects the android webview component (which it might) and the LinkedIn app uses the webview either for the whole app or just for the ads (which it might) then ublock would block ads in the LinkedIn app. I haven't checked whether either of these assumptions is true though.

[–]gwern 4 points5 points  (5 children)

Even if it did all of those, it would still need to have custom recipes for that very specific use-case to match the potentially ever-changing ads inside the feed; LinkedIn is probably not helpfully labeling each ad with <div class="spam">.

[–]how_to_choose_a_name 4 points5 points  (4 children)

If it did all of those, it would work the same as it would on a website. E.g. by using filter lists to detect ad elements and by blocking certain domains that are used to serve ads.

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (3 children)

You say that as if that was easy, static, or even applicable (LI could just serve their ads from precisely the same domain, and might do that just for the performance benefits).

[–]how_to_choose_a_name 3 points4 points  (2 children)

You say that as if it was any different for websites.

If they use an ad platform like Google AdSense then the ads are likely served from external servers and even if they don't it's possible that someone made a rule to detect the elements - just like for any website.

[–]gwern 4 points5 points  (1 child)

It is different for websites. They are inside the browser, underneath the extension, forced to communicate through the standard channels, typically using a 3rd party infrastructure, and so on. The LinkedIn app doesn't do any of that. It's running separately, can do anything an app can do, is serving its own ads from any domain it wants (if it even uses domains) in any way it wants, and has tremendous flexibility to beat any adblocking and change the rules arbitrarily. Very quickly it turns into an AI-complete problem distinguishing one feed entry as spam from the regular feed entries.

[–]skiff151 4 points5 points  (0 children)

1blocker, apologies - getting confused with all the ones I have across my devices.

[–]PresentCompanyExcl 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Adaway runs typical blocklists on a phone + mobile specific ones (but requires root). Blockada runs your traffic through a vpn that blocks some dns requests. That's a limited a block since it can only block domains, and probably wouldn't catch linkin ads.

[–]Gamer-Imp 6 points7 points  (0 children)

A lot of us might be able to speak to this, but are restricted by NDAs.

[–]Beej67[IQ is way less interesting than D&D statistics] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I like the "Gwern's Law" branding.

[–]rds2mch 4 points5 points  (2 children)

I'm 100% with you. I happily pay for content that I can get ad free (e.g. Spotify or Pandora, Netflix, etc) and if I'm forced to consume ads -- for example, in certain podcasts -- it negatively predicts the likelihood that I'll continue with the content. When I go to certain websites (e.g. Huffpost, CNN) where they display those annoying expanding ads in-line while reading, I almost always reflexively close the story I'm reading and slowly stop going to the website.

Meanwhile, I yearly donate to places like aeon.co, and even donate to Sam Harris's podcast, largely because they do not have ads and I do not want them to, even though I'm only a moderate consumer of their content.

[–]gcz77 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Sam Harris, no ads, bit 10 minutes at the beginning of everybpoecadt explaining why thete sure no ads....might as well have ads, they would take up less time.

[–]OrganicOrgasm 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fwiw, I don't think he's added that for a while now.

[–]the_nybblerBad but not wrong 13 points14 points  (1 child)

109% of nothing is still nothing.

[–]The_Lords_Prior 21 points22 points  (0 children)

I hate when change is described in terms of percentage. People don’t understand “percent change” nearly as well as natural frequencies. Percentages are useful to mathy people who’ve spent years learning to think in those ways, but even then it’s almost always better to translate the stat into natural frequencies.

A drug leading to a 50% reduction in mortality rate sounds amazing right? Half as many deaths! But it’s a totally meaningless stat. Does the drug reduce mortality from 50/100 to 25/100? -OR- does it reduce mortality from 2/10,000 to 1/10,000? BOTH reflect a “50% reduction” but only one is a huge effect.

Gwern has no history of misleading people and he has a mathy readership, so this criticism doesn’t really apply to him, but in general if I read about percent-change from an unknown author I immediately assume that the number is meaningless until I have a chance to look up the frequencies.

EDIT: I should also add that this particular context is one of the rare contexts in which percent-change is actually appropriate because Gwern is talking about an effect that is "context-independent". That 10% figure is presumed to apply to many typical websites whether they're tiny or large. That said, no medical or epidemiological study should ever use percent-change ever unless they're talking about something that is truly context-independent. You know, like a drug that reduces mortality rate by some amount, for multiple different ailments with different baseline mortality rates. I'm sure there are cases of percent-change being used appropriately in medicine, but I haven't run across any yet.

[–]DrunkFishBreatheAir 2 points3 points  (1 child)

/u/gwern you mention that adblock doesn't confound this because a few of those studies aren't sensitive to it, and your trial just ignores adblock users entirely. For your trial in particular, would a user appear to never turn if they have adblock as default-off but activate it when they see your ads? That could be part of your signal.

Doesn't apply to the others, but one of the most surprising things of what you're saying in my opinion is that banner ads and streaming interruptions have similar effect sizes, considering streaming ads are MUCH more annoying.

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't think that can really be an effect because at least in my experience, adblockers are typically on by default and block Google AdSense by default. 'default-off' is not how people use adblock or how adblock plugins usually come.

For your scenario to happen, a user would have to deliberately have gwern.net whitelisted in advance (so they'd have to be a previous returning-visitor which is maybe 20% of traffic), despite the only thing that accomplishing would be to enable display of ads on gwern.net, and then once they saw the the banner ad (which they deliberately opted into) they would then have to be in such dudgeon that most of them would then take the effort to re-enable adblock and disappear from total traffic statistics, leading to a measured decrease. And this is supposed to affect up to 9% of gwern.net users? I mean, that'd be a large fraction of all returning visitors who are doing this convoluted and self-defeating thing.

[–]CPlusPlusDeveloper 3 points4 points  (3 children)

Interesting. Any clarity regarding how much of the effect is the clutter of the ad itself, versus the slower page loads that come with the megabytes of cruft with modern ad networks?

[–]gwern 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Hard to say. That would vary across the 4 datapoints.

I used Google AdSense for a single banner ad, which is pretty fast in my experience and certainly nothing like the horrors you see on some media websites where dozens of different ad networks are loading thousands of files. I would expect the performance hit to be very minimal. Nevertheless, for my second experiment, I switched to a single static small PNG (advertising TripleByte because why not) hosted on gwern.net whose display is toggled by JS, which should both eliminate whatever performance burden GA caused and also equalize the bandwidth across ad/no-ad conditions (since I believe web browsers still have to download the PNG even if the JS then doesn't enable the display). So if the causal estimate is about the same as before, that'll imply that the performance impact was minor. We'll see what happens at the end of the month...

For Mozilla, their users presumably encountered the full range of ads online across all domains they visit, so anywhere from ultra-lightweight to Lovecraft-esque horrors. It could be a substantial contributor there.

For Pandora, the audio ads are 'inline', so to speak, and it's hard to see it having any meaningful performance impact aside from the listener's time being wasted not listening to music and patiently waiting through the ad to finish playing, of course. (That is, their ads are ultra-lightweight in the sense that they don't slow anything else down before or after, but ultra-heavy in the sense that the ads block the music itself while the ads are playing. So you could interpret it either way.)

For LinkedIn, they are using a mobile app and control the entire experience, so if they are at all smart about the implementation, the performance impact should be nil. Downloading 1 extra optional feed item in the background and displaying it at some point in the future inside the newsfeed should be extremely cheap.

So for 3 of them, I'd say the performance impact of the ads themselves should be minor to nothing and shouldn't explain why they turn in enormous estimates like 10%+.

[–]dnkndntsThestral patronus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's surprising to me that you're so surprised by this data. Ads are a huge turn-off for me anywhere. They're so trashy and uncouth. I even try to avoid wearing clothes with brand logos on them just because the thought of being a walking ad for Big Textile makes me feel like I haven't showered in a week.

Ads radiate classlessness.

[–]nolrai 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Is this surprising somehow? I would have guessed higher, but with low certainty.