I believe that all of the usual ads have been turned off for a test through the weekend.
Zergnet – off.
Big banner at the top – off.
Prosper ads with the little triangles – off.
Our testing made it clear that each one of those was breaking the site in various ways.
?
We are trying out a new kind of ad, which was pinned to the bottom of the screen for a short time as a way to show us what it would look like. I’ll be polite and say that it caused a kerfuffle, which I know because I got email as well as multiple site feedback messages through the form. So yay for everyone reporting a problem right away!
The ad is now in the sidebar where it belongs. On phones, the sidebar shows up beneath the content and the comments.
For now, it just rotates though the 6 or 7 most recent posts, but on Monday ads will be added to the mix.
There is no way to pause the video in the window or close it.
I wish I knew more about what to expect, but until ads are added to the mix, this is all I know.
But you can all let me know how the site is behaving – is it loading fine, or taking forever to load, on iPads and tablets? How about phones? How about the back arrow and anything else that has broken with the other ads.
I have also seen some complaints in the comments about nothing able to pause the video or close it. When someone says something is worse than Zergnet, that’s not good.
Chime in if you have any thoughts you would like to share.
Update: Peony photo included for calming effect. Plus, these are my last peonies to bloom for the year, so I had to share them.
WaterGirl
No comments, everything must be perfect. :-)
BruceFromOhio
Peony envy.
TKH
It is probably not news to people in ad tec, but the fact that the ads are “moving” makes them harder to ignore, for me anyways. The same ads in a stills format I could easily ignore.
This seems to be the newest technology. I had been looking at buying a new backpacking pack and now I get served these ads on other sites I visit where a pack is displayed and then it zooms in on it, giving the impression of motion. Much harder to ignore than the same ad in static format. So I’ll have to train myself . Or maybe a post-it note stuck to that part of the screen of the tablet will do the trick?
Gin & Tonic
I don’t use it often these days, but I have an older iPad Mini running iOS 12.5.3 (the latest) with Safari, and the site loads very (very) slowly there. This has always been the case. It’s a little better with no ads, but still slow.
Ohio Mom
Before, the site would have a lot of trouble loading for me, and that is definitely not happening anymore. So I am happy.
BruceFromOhio
I really enjoy the site with no ads, though I realize that is unsustainable.
Or is it? At the risk of being a nebby Ned, if there was an annual fundraiser to make the site ad-free for a year, I think you’d find our fundraising prowess is formidable if we knew how much it cost to run the joint. I’ve already kicked John some scratch to cover the shortfall while the testing is in progress, and I’m happy to do so again.
Firefox 88.0.1 64-bit on Windows 10/20H2 19042.985 and the site runs like a well-oiled machine.
Ruckus
The last week or so the site was loading badly, in that it would seem to take several jerky steps to fully load.
I still have been getting the text box rather than the visual comment box, although it has worked OK and when I have commented using the text box it has always reloaded the visual box after the comment was made.
iMac with latest upgrades, the phone has not been as bad as the desktop, iphone XR with latest updates.
CarolPW
It evades my ad blocker (I donate regularly to compensate for the blocking).
It repeats, maddingly, incessantly. Will still be as madding repeating ads rather than site content.
It is always there in the sidebar no matter how many pages down or up one goes.
OK, if one makes the width of the window small enough the fucker goes away.
It is truly impossibly distracting for anyone with motion-related issues.
WaterGirl
@CarolPW: I have trouble with motion like that myself, so I understand.
The video ad evades your ad blocker? It does not evade mine. What ad blocker do you use?
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: That sounds frustrating.
What would be useful to know is whether the site behaved better when the ads were off for several days.
Since then we have turned on ads of X type for a few days, then turned those off and had only ads of Y type for a few days, and then the same with Z type ads.
So unfortunately I can’t do much with the information you supplied. :-(
CarolPW
@WaterGirl:
Ghostery.I could not do a reply in visual mode, and the stupid mice fragments showed up in text mode.
ETA Re Ghostery – I was not looking for a nuclear grade ad blocker and it is a free option in Firefox.
WaterGirl
@CarolPW: I haven’t used Ghostery in awhile because it doesn’t behave properly with the more recent MacOS.
But there might be a way to have Ghostery block a particular URL.
We are just testing this ad, though, so I don’t know if that would be worth the trouble for just a few days.
HumboldtBlue
@CarolPW:
Try adblockplus.
The site hasn’t loaded this smoothly in weeks.
prostratedragon
Video box now in the sidebar at end on my android phone ?. Loading is smooth and quick on both phone and desktop. Video is trapped by adblocker on the desktop.
WaterGirl
@HumboldtBlue: As of which day?
By noon today we had turned off all the other ads besides this new one.
WaterGirl
@prostratedragon: Yeah, I figure the phone peeps will like it, because it’s out of the way.
CarolPW
@HumboldtBlue: Thanks, but the nice thing about Ghostery was that there was no need to download yet another program. I will cope with skinny windows for now and see how things fall out.
Geminid
The ads don’t bother me, and personally I like it that the site can pay for itself.
FelonyGovt
Video is now safely ensconced on the very bottom on my iPhone and it’s fine. Earlier today it was blocking the bottom right of the posts and comments and I couldn’t turn it off and I just closed out of the site. ?
CarolPW
@WaterGirl: That’s what the skinny window gets me, and I will be able to deal with this.
mrmoshpotato
Haha! Fuck Zergshit!
Baud
I’ve already maxed out my credit card. The new ads are great!
mrmoshpotato
@Geminid:
Only tax cuts pay for themselves.
dexwood
I have no idea how lucrative ads are for Balloonjuice. None of my business. It does seem, however, that killing all the ads would make things easier for all concerned. They’re annoying, troublesome, and stupid. It’s Mr. Cole’s place to run as he sees fit, but when I see how much cash we raise for various causes, I can’t help but think many here would be happy to financially support this place as an ads free zone.
WaterGirl
@FelonyGovt: Yeah, I explained earlier in several threads that that was just a temporary placement so we could see what the ad itself would look like. Never intended to stay there, but yeah, that was a bad position, even for just a few minutes.
HumboldtBlue
@WaterGirl:
Today, this is the first I’ve visited today.
Tenar Arha
@WaterGirl: I’ve been too distracted lately to pay attention to how the site was behaving on my phone, but it ‘feels’ zippier loading wo ads. IIRC the ads loaded more slowly than the text & tweets, IOW often slower than tweets with photos compared to plain text posts.
The scrolling post widget was the first real problem I had recently that really bothered me. Anything that blocks more than 1/3 of the post on a phone screen, animated or not, is completely unacceptable if it can’t be dismissed some way. Like many have noted, I too really don’t like anything I cannot dismiss, scroll past, mute after unmuting, &/ pause.
I don’t mind ads. No really. I just don’t want to continually be clicking one by accident & then off to another site bc of a stray press. I don’t know what the happy medium for that is though.
silvery
I’m using Firefox, and I can R-click on the ad video to pause it. Not sure if that feature will still work when/if it turns into real ads.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl:
Now I’ve got a thing in the margin with videos of BJ posts. Is that intentional? It’s very annoying
ETA: Okay, now I see in your post that this is a new ad. IT’S MUCH WORSE THAN ANYTHING YOU HAD BEFORE. I hate it.
WaterGirl
@Tenar Arha: hmm. Sounds like you can give me feedback on how the site is loading today, without any of the regular ads but having the video ad in the sidebar. (at the bottom on phones)
So how responsive is the site tonight, and how do you feel about there video ad in the sidebar?
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl:
None of the previous ads bothered me in the slightest. This thing on the side with constant video is making me want to leave this site as soon as I can possibly do so.
WaterGirl
@silvery: Interesting. Right click does not pause it on my mac with Chrome.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl:
If this is going to be a regular feature, I won’t be able to come here any more.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: @zhena gogolia:
Very helpful to know. This is everybody’s chance to say what they really think while we are testing this new ad.
All feedback welcome, positive and negative. Looking for data points so John can make an informed decision.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: Understood. We don’t want that. :-(
Is an ad blocker an option?
Do you mostly read BJ on a computer?
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl:
I read it on a Mac laptop, Chrome. I don’t want to mess with anything like ad blocker. None of the ads has ever bothered me at all until this one, except another un-turn-off-able video one you had years ago. I just don’t look at the stationary ones, and they don’t bug me at all. This one won’t let me look away.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: when I tested the video (with ads intermingled with recent posts) on a different site, if you clicked on the video with an ad up, it opened to a new tab about that product.
Then, when I closed that tab and went back to BJ, the video was paused. That wasn’t too bad. But the constant playing does not make my eyes or my brain happy, so I get where you are coming from.
We’ll have to see how it plays out.
NotMax
@CarolPW
Ghostery (free version) performance solely as an adblocker can be spotty unless installed in concert with a dedicated adblocker, however it excels as a privacy enhancer which squelches tracking.
Free: Adblock Plus is a sturdy workhorse adblocker, uBlock Origin is a broadly configurable content blocker (that also means ads). Links are for installing on Firefox.
Over many years of Firefox usage have found Adblock Plus, Ghostery and Privacy Badger an effective digital equivalent to a Tinker to Evers to Chance triple play.
Percysowner
Things are working great with ads off. My usual issue is that tweets that are embedded in the main article take FOREVER to load. Now, with no ads, they load immediately. I also now have both the visual and text options in Reply, which I didn’t have earlier today.
I thought it might be my adbocker (like others I throw money at BJ every month), but even turning it off didn’t help. There were no Visual or Text options in Replies and the tweets were slow to load.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: On Monday the ads will fill in between the recent posts in the video, and then we can see whether clicking on an ad will make the video stop.
I checked, and there’s nothing we can do about the video until then.
If you make the BJ window skinny enough, the site thinks you are on a phone and it moves the sidebar down to the bottom. Maybe that can get you through the weekend?
Uncle Cosmo
Alternately, if one zooms in on the thread text to increase the width to the size of the screen, it shoves the fucker (and sidebar) right off the right side.
Pete Mack
On mobile site, please, please, please dont add autoplay video. My high speed data runs out way too early in the month already. (I also hate the autoload high-res images at NYT. And the uncached giant preload at LGM.)
WaterGirl
@Percysowner: Things are going to stay exactly as they are ad-wise through the weekend.
Let me know if visual mode is consistently there through the weekend? And whether tweets are still loading right away?
Without changing anything else, we should be able to see if getting rid of the other ads really does help or whether it’s an intermittent problem and it just happens to be behaving right now. :-)
WaterGirl
@Uncle Cosmo: That doesn’t work on my mac laptop in Chrome. Do you happen to have a very large monitor?
WaterGirl
@Pete Mack:
Thanks for raising that point. I hadn’t even thought of that.
Mary G
The Vid-Crunch slide show is dreadful, but whatever pays the bills can be lived with as far as I am concerned.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
You using Firefox? If so, what happens with the ad if you click the little rectangular “Toggle Reader View” icon not quite all the way to the right in the URL field? Might be a temporary ameliorative for you.
(Click it again to return to standard view.)
WaterGirl
Please keep the feedback coming – positive or negative. More feedback = better decisions.
WaterGirl
@Pete Mack: The autoplay video will be on through the weekend, and on Monday we can see how it will behave when ads are in there with the recent posts.
Apologies to your data plan.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: Reader view, on Safari at least, shows only the post and not the comments.
I have no idea how it behaves in other browsers.
Benw
My peonys are going fucking bananas this week.
WaterGirl
Totally unrelated to ads, I just discovered that we don’t just have audio, we also have video for the Four Directions zoom.
I know a couple of people had asked if it was recorded, so I thought I would let you guys know.
WaterGirl
@Benw: Nice!
Do you live near Chicago, I can’t remember. You must be a little behind us here in Champaign.
sab
Mine too. Fron tiny buds to full bloom in 24 hours.
WaterGirl
@sab:
That’s crazy talk!
NotMax
OT. Damn it. Have need of the sawzall for something in the yard. Grabbed the rechargeable battery in order to pop it into the charger and it promptly slipped fro my grasp, shattering into multiple pieces when it hit the floor. Luckily do have an older back-up battery, which kind’a sort’a can still hold a charge.
Took the edge off feeling pleased at having reconfigured positioning of some electronic components earlier in the afternoon in order to make certain set-ups look less higgledy-piggledy.
@WaterGirl
Okay, scratch that then.
Benw
@WaterGirl: Long Island. We’re usually about 2 days behind you all in weather and about a week behind in blooms :)
sab
I am on a Nook and I am not seeing anything adwise at all.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: That stinks, about your battery.
Percysowner
@WaterGirl: I’ll check through the weekend. Also, I’m running Firefox 89 under Max OSX Mojave 10.4.6.
WaterGirl
@sab: Where do you see the sidebar stuff on a Nook? In the sidebar or at the bottom after the comments?
WaterGirl
@Percysowner: Thank you!
P.S. I hope others will do that, as well.
WaterGirl
I think I’m gonna close the laptop for the evening, but I will check back for more feedback in the morning.
sab
@WaterGirl: In the botton, unless I turn the Nook on its side ( which I hrdly ever do
ETA I just saw the tiny test ads. They look like the screen of my flip phone.
TS (the original)
I don’t use an adblocker – living outside the US and not using paypal I usually can’t pay in response to any requests – so my way of paying is to have the ads on the screen & clicking on some occasionally.
The new video ad is making it impossible for me to stay on the site. It cannot be stopped, it cannot be moved off the visible screen. It flashes non stop and stays on the screen when everything else moves.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
As of late I’ve been off and on here so I haven’t always known what ads are supposed to be on or not. And it’s not totally consistent in proper loading/crappy loading. The best I can say is sometimes it acts like twitter while loading, jerky and just when you think it’s done, it acts like it now has to load War and Peace, page by page, just fast enough that you can never find your place again.
Right now the site is doing fine.
I understand why John does not want to do a pay site, first it’s a gigantic pain in the ass, second is trying to find the magic monthly figure that won’t chase away participants and yet still pays the bills and knowing that not everyone can participate on a paying site. I’ve stopped going to many sites that I used to go to because they are now paying and it just isn’t worth it. But this site is very good in the way it’s structured, like no threaded comments, yea, and really just the entire structure/posters/commenters makes this a go to online stop. It’s the only one that I go to daily. I don’t comment every day but I read every day, most days several times a day. It’s almost like a club but one that isn’t snooty or exclusive, or pompous or arrogant. Is informative, fun, a better way to spend time than TV, especially commercial TV.
Gravenstone
I was about to suggest that disabling HTML5 autoplay killed the new ad. Not quite accurate, it will still run but appears unable to cycle more than a single pass through its content. This is Win 10 with Chrome v 91.0.4472.77.
eta: ad stays “dead” after the first cycle, through multiple refreshes
coming back to the page after opening a different one resets the block, so you get a fresh cycle of Tunch’s glare.
Another Scott
On Win10 Chrome with uBlock Origin enabled, everything looks the same as always to me – no ads, no weird videos.
I decided to fire up Win10 Firefox with uBO – looks fine with uBO enabled (5 domains loaded). With uBO disabled I see 18 domains loaded including VidCrunch.com and I see the video box in the right column that stays present as the page is scrolled and cannot obviously be closed or paused.
I HATE videos like that. I HATE video boxes that appear when I scroll a page away from a main page (e.g. on TheHill.com and lots of other places). I spent a lot of time once figuring out how to block such things with uBO (the video box is about 15 HTML elements stacked on top of each other and you have to block about 10 of them before the ad goes away…).
Videos that cannot be obviously closed are EVIL. Especially for people who have to pay for their data.
My (potentially faulty – please correct me if I’m wrong) understanding is that the coders get a cut of the ad revenue. Thus ads aren’t going away anytime soon. But this arrangement seems designed to first maximize revenue for them, and maybe #5 on the list, not be annoying for readers here. It’s not a good incentive structure. My guess is that the vast majority of people who end up here are readers and will disappear without a second thought if they’re getting abusive video ads.
You and John do what you need to do. I know you don’t pick the ads, and you have various constraints and are trying to make us happy. I’ll keep using my adblocker and keep donating monthly. But please make the coders understand that readers aren’t going to put up with this crap – they’ll go elsewhere. They shouldn’t need reminders every few weeks/months that the ads they’re allowing to be served up are EVIL. I’ll gladly donate to find other coders if it comes to that.
My $0.02. Sincere thanks for all you do.
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: Appreciate the well-thought out feedback.
Can you send me an email message, so I can reply?
WaterGirl
@Another Scott: Just to be clear…
Trying this new ad was not an attempt to make more ad money; it was an attempt to try to find ads that people don’t hate, that wouldn’t slow down the site and wouldn’t make certain features not work properly.
something fabulous
I mostly read and interact from my mac laptop (Mojave 10.14.6) and use Safari. For that, I have adblocker plus, so am not seeing anything. Just checked it on my phone (tiny old iPhone 7? 8? don’t even remember! and it is fine hidden away at the bottom, for as often as I use the phone for this. However! To see what everyone was talking about, I just went over to see how it looks in Chrome, where I have no blockers, and I also really really hate it. Reminds me, were you here then WaterGirl, of the RT ad there used to be in the right sidebar– usually Larry King or Jesse Ventura in an endless loop? You could mute it but not stop it as I recall and was both distracting and a huge performance clog. Maybe these days the technology is better enough that the throttling doesn’t happen any more, but certainly the fact that this current one anchors in place regardless of scrolling and also that it can’t be paused is a pretty big impediment to me too.
I think the whole paywall subscription service question was asked and answered pretty fully a while back as not the BJ Way, and I’m glad of that, but could there be something like how Wonkette does it, and people can just donate? Then the folks who would be amenable to $5 or whatever a month could set up to do that, and the folks who on a quarterly or twice yearly drive could go “oh shit, lemme get on that!” could do that (guess which one I would be :) ) and just not have ads, at all?
Another Scott
@WaterGirl: Thanks very much.
email sent.
Cheers,
Scott.
Steeplejack
@TS (the original):
If you are on a computer, I presume you have your browser set to a full-screen window. So you get the post and comments down the left side and the new floating ad in the blank space on the right.
What you can do is reduce the width of the browser window to show only the post and comments. That gives FYWP the idea that you are in “phone mode,” and the floating ad (and other “sidebar” stuff, I believe) goes to the very bottom of the page. You never have to see it unless you specifically look for it.
frosty
It was worse than Zergnet, it took up 2/3 of the screen on my tiny iPhone SE. I had to turn the phone off and on to get rid of it.
I’m not seeing anything now.
TomatoQueen
The work computer (Win10/Edge/HPLaptop of dubious parentage)allowed a cumulative Windoze update last night, during which many of my settings seem to have reverted to default, which didn’t make a shitty workday easier. The lack of a serious adblocker making everything impossible courtesy of my gov’t was quite shocking, but then maybe it’s hidden in some bizarre place; that that unspeakable vidcrunch desecration of poor Tunch got through is outrageous. If it continues, I’ll be saying so long, as I can’t tolerate the headache it causes. The lack of consideration for any possible jackal who has experienced seizures from screen flicker, or found out the hard way about such a vulnerability, is close to a hanging offense.
On the personal computer, Lenovo T530 Win10 Fireyfox 89 or Chrome, armed with UBlock, no ads, no vidcrunch, no slow-loads, and the little fun thing with the edit box that isn’t so terrible really.
Gvg
I am on my iPad Pro safari, I have not been having problems while others said they were. Sometimes a Twitter copy says something went wrong, but when I try again it works.
i don’t care for moving ads. I could take it awhile, then it started bugging me. I pinch widened the screen and moved it to the right, so the video ad doesn’t show.
it always puzzles me how ad people can think people will watch annoying ads and buy their products. Nice ads can sell to me. Obnoxious ones can’t. They need to be something people actually want. I would suggest pet goods. Maybe groceries considering the cooking talk here. Political ads are always the wrong ones I think because we talk about what makes us mad. Possibly home goods and travel.
I am usually in the market for unusual garden plants but I don’t think their are enough like me to make this a good garden ad market.
Yet Another Haldane
Site working smoothly for me, ship it!
Firefox 88.0.1 (64-bit) on Ubuntu-20.10.
Auto-play video would be really bad, though. I think Firefox disables that behind the scenes.
Steeplejack
@TomatoQueen:
See my suggestion at #73 above.
TKH
Hi Watergirl,
my feedback was meant to convey that this latest ad “innovation” sucks for me, and apparently it does for others as well. I don’t think anyone here believes that you and John are trying to squeeze more money out of us. You are just volunteering your time, a lot of it, and your skills to keep this place running, we know. And we also know that bills payanda sunt, if you pardon the pig Latin.
What I just can’t figure out is how these comically mis-targeted ads, for me at any rate, can apparently generate enough of an income stream that it is worth having them. The mind, it boggles.
Cheers and thanks for what you are doing here!
TomatoQueen
@Steeplejack:
I might try tomorrow
NotMax
@Yet Another Haldane
While there is a privacy setting in Firefox to disable autoplay, in my experience it is hit and miss and more reliable at disabling audio than it is video. YMMV.
Yet Another Haldane
@NotMax: Yeah, it seems … selective. With the new Balloon Juice ad box (juice box?), the picture was static on page 1, but on the second page it cycled through recent posts, as advertised. Now I have this post in a page of its own, and the video is static again.
Found a way to pause it: pop out the video (for some reason Firefox calls this “picture-in-picture mode”) and hit the pause button that appears on the new window. Voila, it pauses!
Another Scott
It’s uncanny.
[rofl]
Cheers,
Scott.
Redshift
The site is pretty normal on Android/Chrome/Pixel XL. I went back to the Covid post to see if this version replicates the fast Twitter loading I saw that one time, but no such luck. Either this one ad is enough to defeat that, or it was just a random bit of good luck in the first place and not reproducible.
Another Scott
@Yet Another Haldane: On Chrome (with no adblocker) on my S20 phone, there’s no such ‘pop-out’ option. Long-press gives me an option to download the .mp4. And I can “cast” it to my Chromecast (via clicking a semi-transparent button). And I can click a flashing “Read More” button. But that’s it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Benw
Open letter to the Lakers: being down 20 is a bad plan.
Ken
@Another Scott: I think it’s a poke at TFG’s blog shutting down because the 30-day free hosting trial expired.
Tenar Arha
@WaterGirl: I know I’m late, but loading is comparatively very fast right now. (I popped over to video/ad heavy crooksandliars & rawstory for my comparisons).
Oh, & I’m running iOS 14.4.2 & Firefox version 33 as my primary setup on my iPhone 11 Pr
ETA oh, and the video ad in the sidebar doesn’t seem to be causing any trouble right now at all.
something fabulous
@TKH: Yes to all of this, and well said!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ken: Or the DPRK News Service reads Balloon Juice.
BruceFromOhio
@Another Scott
@?BillinGlendaleCA
LOL awesome
A Streeter
@WaterGirl: Right clicking got me a pause symbol. Clicking on this pause symbol took me to whatever BJ post happened to be on the thing at that moment. Going back, however, brought me back to this page — with the damn ad STILL. Hallelujah.
MacBook Air, Catalina, Safari.
ETA The thing’s running again as this comment times through. Maybe if I go back it’ll stop again
ETA2 No, but now I know how to stop it, at least tonight.
Uncle Cosmo
I don’t have a link or other source for this, but – IIRC many years ago someone ran a study on what features of an ad correlate with success in marketing the advertised product. The characteristic most highly correlated with marketing success was whether the
markcustomer noticed the ad. Period. Whether the individual found the ad entertaining or annoying, informative or irrelevant, did not correlate at all. Whereupon most of the creative ads were retired, and we have been bombarded with noxious too-loud attention-grabbing crap ever since. :^(BrianM
Longtime reader, first time complainer. The video ad is driving me crazy.
WaterGirl
@BrianM: I appreciate the feedback. More feedback = better decisions. thank you