My contempt towards a brand is directly proportional to how often they interrupt my playlists.

I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don’t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller. 

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”

“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”

“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”

That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you. 

Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.

I started screenshotting my favorite ads

Just fucking take a bite out of your soap you piece of shit. Sleep with it and eat it

I don’t even know what this is trying to sell me. Tumblr doesn’t either. The ad doesn’t know either. Did I click on the link? Fucking absolutely. I think it was broken

Beautiful a+ 10/10

Ok, so before working on Tumblr, even before working for Automattic, I worked for the empire an ad network. We were the middle men that took money for advertisers and bought ad space from apps and sites to place their ads. What you need to understand is this is a totally automated process. Sites like this don’t sell space to every advertiser individually. They use another layer of middlemen called “ad exchanges”. Think about them like eBay for ads, but where the users are just computers.

Long story short, it works like this:

Now, the price for those ad spaces increases exponentially when they include segmentation info. So the bare minimum you get for an ad space is something like “a space of this size, in this app/site, for a system using this language”. From there, a lot of crap about you can be added: with the exception of your name, everything else is fair game: where you are, which sites you have seen, your age, your gender, your friends, the apps you have installed… Facebook options are like a fucked up catalog of human behaviors you can micro-target your ads towards. Of course, if you are advertising something, it’s much more valuable for you an ad spot that can tell you is going to be seen by someone you think is the target of the campaign. So including personal info can make an ad easily 100x or 1000x more expensive.

Everything described happens, literally, in milliseconds, so no human intervention is possible, everything is programmed by folks like me. Folks like me that need to test what they are doing to make sure it actually works in a real life environment.

So we used to have some small real money budget to test things worked as expected. Basically you put a test ad, program it to bid the minimum amount possible (you don’t want to waste your budget and you can get impressions for something as low as 0.001€ if you don’t mind to get the spaces no one wants) and then open an app you know is using the same ad exchange you are using, and start to doomscroll until you get to see your testing ad showing up in the app. Until you get to see it and stop the automatic bidding, another few hundred or thousand totally unrelated folks would have seen it too. And it would have cost your company maybe 0.1€.

Since this is dirt cheap, you launch literally shitposts as an ad. My testing ad to go was a picture of a pony with a button that said “Ride now!” and a link to google.com. if you have seen an ad like that between 2013 to 2015, that’s on me, you are welcome.

Now, of course, the cheaper the ad space, the bigger the chance to get a testing ad from a bored chap that just needs to test the ads their company sells will still be shown after whatever chances they have just done.

So what happens if you have a (hell)site that generates A LOT of traffic, a lot of empty ad spaces, but shares no premium “personal info” segmentation data? The cost of those spaces is going to be the bare bottom, and since there are so many of them, every bid will probably have very few bidders and the price won’t go up. So… Testing shitpost galore!

So every time you see a weird ad on Tumblr, especially when they have broken links or the like… You are seeing a live proof that Tumblr is not selling any info about you (and we are getting almost nothing for every ad we show)

So… our theories that Tumblr was just a testing site for ads was right?

lmao at mozilla having to be like “not only did we not get rid of the fox in our logo but if all the people yelling at us actually use our browser they should have known that 🤔”

this one’s real though

lol, i’d been wondering if i’d missed an update or something.

ANYWAY i fucking love how that firefox article discusses memes as a part of the misinformation news cycle. Good. Correct. 

Also please install firefox please, i’m begging you. The reason all of your school sites and work sites and whatever can insist on only working in chrome browsers is because there’s no diversity in the browser market and you should be using firefox because it is GOOD and on almost every computer it’s going to be as fast or faster than chrome (nearly TEN YEARS AGO there was an issue with firefox being somewhat slower but that isn’t the case anymore) and the extensions are wonderful and it now has native tracker blocking and you can import all your bookmarks and

!!!!!!! There is an extension called Auto Tab Discard that sleeps tabs you haven’t looked at in a set amount of time to save your computer’s resources!!!!!

And also firefox is free and open source and it is not a giant advertising engine, like, i posted the other day about the sponsored sites thing but you can turn that off with two clicks, how much fucking effort does it take to get chrome to stop pushing fucking google products at you fuck chrome FIREFOX IS SO FUCKING GOOD PLEASE USE IT AND HELP TO BREAK GOOGLE’S NEAR MONOPOLY ON THE BROWSER MARKET

Also you can install firefox mobile on your phone and put ublock origin on it and you can block browser ads in your phone like I have no idea why everyone isn’t already doing that I haven’t seen a browser ad in fucking YEARS (you can watch youtube in your browser ad free. Why are you still looking at ads? I’m so confused)

In Conclusion Please Use Firefox.

This is great and all but it’s a little antiquated to talk about ad-blocking without acknowledging that this can severely hurt small businesses, independent businesses, small creators, journalism, etc.

And in a post so focused on helping break up the google monopoly and maintaining free and open internet it seems a bit short sited to not consider that as blocking your favorite YouTuber doesn’t hurt YouTube but it does hurt that YouTuber. And the same goes to every smaller magazine or newspaper you read online, and any other creator that is dependent on ad revenue to continue to provide free access to their content.

Hi, I have worked on several actual real life publications, including small local papers and independent magazines. I also worked on one of the online magazines that had to significantly retread during the adpocalypse and cut loose all their freelancers.

Pay for an actual subscription.

Do the same thing for your favorite youtubers - give them a dollar a month on patreon.

If you can’t afford to support creators on patreon then interact with their work - liking and commenting on youtube videos helps move creators up in the recommendation algorithm and will get their videos viewed by more people who aren’t running adblockers (but who should be running adblockers).

Unless your favorite youtuber is getting millions of views per video each person watching with an adblocker off is netting them an absolutely minuscule amount of money. You know when you see game chips on McDonald’s cups or soda caps that say “no monetary value, chip is worth 1/100 of one cent”? That’s your view. That’s how much it makes. (that is a SLIGHT exaggeration)

Also online ads have never actually made sense as a revenue source and it seems ludicrous on its face to blame adblockers for the collapse of the independent news industry when massive layoffs have been a feature of newsrooms all across the country since the late nineties (you know who got hit with the gig economy early? Journalists. And shit, you can automate away entire segments of the industry.)

The advertising model of Facebook and Youtube is actually specifically responsible for shutting down more independent media sites or causing layoffs. Remember in 2017 when a shitload of sites like Cracked fired a bunch of people and started publishing a lot less? Yeah that was because of a change in ad revenue that had everything to do with Facebook hoping to promote a particular kind of content and nothing to do with users turning on adblock.

ALSO.

LIKE FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL STANDPOINT.

Look I spend all my time on youtube watching anarchists and guitar tutorials. When I do turn on ads I get ads for right libertarian phone games, Prager U, and Ben Shapiro’s sister’s shitty ideas about femininity.

And while I do like the idea of wasting Dennis Prager’s money the truth is that he’s funded by billionaires so youtube advertising costs him nothing while making the world measurably worse. Did you know Prager U is being shown in schools? Do you think that would be as true if people weren’t being directed to his channel from cooking videos and car repair how-tos?

You know how tumblr took away the porn and then started having ads that have porn on them sometimes?

You know how google adsense has been used to inject malware?

You know how online ads don’t actually work and are being used to enrich google while sucking money away from creators who buy ads and paying pennies to creators who generate content for huge advertising networks like google?

I get why businesses engage with advertising networks, but I sure as fuck do not have to. And neither do you. And if you want to talk about the exploitation of labor (which I always, always do) then let’s talk about how Youtube absolutely COULD pay more to the people who are creating content for the platform (or could pay at a flat rate, or could share metrics so that people actually know what kind of ad income to expect) instead of taking all the ad revenue from billions of daily views and using it to try to make healthcare even worse and to crawl even further into people’s personal lives.

If all you are doing to help the creators you appreciate is viewing their content with ads enabled you’re not actually helping those creators. Pay for their products and promote their projects.

Buying one sticker from the merch store of your favorite podcast will instantly get them more money directly from you than turning your adblocker off for a hundred years would.

The ONLY reason you should watch youtube with an adblocker off is if you’ve got a playlist of videos running *SPECIFICALLY* to passively generate money for a cause (but even then, just go open a chrome window and put on youtube and mute the window, don’t listen to ads and don’t use the window for browsing and don’t turn off ads in your main browser and allow trackers to collect information about you).

NOTHING that you do that gives money to google helps to support a free and open internet. Google and their products are the enemy of a free and open internet. Turn off ads and pay content creators directly. If you can’t pay them, promote them. It’s better for them and better for the internet as a whole.

(Thought Slime! Thought Slime is the anarchist youtuber I’m spending a ton of time on and you should go check out some videos on the channel.)