About those crazy ads.. in Site Updates (Josh)

Hey everyone,

First, thanks for all of your help with the initial testing of the beta site! We still have a lot of work ahead of us to iron out the bugs, but it’s really promising to have made so much progress in such a short amount of time. A breath of fresh air, truly. More to come on that front soon.

Anyway, let’s talk about that craziness with the ads that was affecting those of you that don’t subscribe. A week or two back I started getting emails from users telling me “enough with the ads!!”. I had no clue what was going on, so I hit up Buffy. Here’s a little peek behind the curtain:

Okay, it wasn’t either of us. So uh.. what could it be? I dug into it, and it turns out that for some reason Google Adsense (the platform we use to run ads on the site) decided to start running experiments on its own. Like, it just went for it. This included ads in the middle of entries, in comment lists, basically anywhere it felt like shoving them. The feature is called “Auto Ads” and yeah — it’s a lot! I went in and turned it off, and, well.. it then turned itself back on. Multiple times! As a sanity check Buffy went in to try turning it off himself, and I guess it likes him better or something because it stuck after that. Whew.

The funny thing about all this is that despite the frankly horrible user experience, revenue did go up by 15% during the experiment. So, in Google’s eyes that was a total success. Me? Not so much. Yeesh.

Anywho, that’s that. We’re busy bees behind the scenes working on the beta, more to come on that very soon.

A story in three parts:

<3,
-J

Last updated March 20, 2024