Sad, but true...

[brad]

czircon writes: LiveJournal is really going to shit lately. The "sponsored communities" are bad enough; now we have to put up with ads on the front page as well? And not just banner ads, but ads with Flash and fake forms to fill out because they think it's more likely to trick you into clicking on it? Ugh. Unfortunately I'm pretty much stuck here.
*sigh*

Comments

[punk_apple]

Oh I would totally disable flash on my system if there was a way .. so tried CSS filtering, domain blocks ... but I would just want to not see a single flash thing without choosing to. And even then it would be for a game maybe, once every year or so, not for seeing ads.
As long as it doesn't start to look like bravenet ...
Maybe needs more trying to force them to get that the users should be able to select their ad level.

[brad]

This extension for FireFox is great:
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

[chezmax]

Flashblock is the best invention ever. (Though it does break a few web pages).

In other news, the ads suck, and it's unfortunate that you've lost that much control. :/

I never see them cause I rarely go to the front page :)

[ex_ex_mcm69]

AdBlock Plus is more convenient IMO :)

[jgrafton]

Is there somewhere useful to complain so it's more than just you fighting against the ads?

[jamesd]

Set the ad preferences to things you will never buy. Every day click on each ad link that you see, once per ad. This will decrease the buy rate and decrease the value of ads on LiveJournal.

[brad]

I'm sure short-term revenue went up ... I'm not debating that. They probably get a lot of money for that ad, and more than they do for regular ads.

The question is how you quantify the cost of the long-term bleeding.

[brad]

We can, and do, do A/B tests. Not as often as we should, but we definitely do them and have the capabilities to do them.

Measuring the activity/paths of a logged out user with and without ads would be interesting... I'll bring that up, thanks!

:)

[graceadieu]

If you don't like the ads, just don't access the front page. And I do not agree that LJ is diminishing in quality. There are bound to be some 'packaging' changes when a product enters the mainstream and becomes famous.

Going mainstream

[popcultureicon]

That happened years ago, without ads.

[rival]

It always surprises me when you say stuff like this -- as the original founder of LiveJournal, why don't you have more control over company policy?

[brad]

You can't be involved in everything. I can give my opinions on lots of things pretty easily, often multiple times and passionately, but I can't follow every issue to completion, making sure I "win". So there's bound to be times that I lose, like this.

[evan]

I like to think (or at least wish, in a good-intentioned way) you have bigger and better things to worry about! That doesn't make it any less lame though.

[brad]

Yeah, that's the tradeoff... I see a lot of things being done not how I'd do them, but at least by my not doing them, I have time for the things I am doing.