= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Kevin comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (219)
I agree that your questions sound important, but there is a bit of a Catch 22 here and not all of them have answers. To get the answers, we need Jim's attention, but we can't get Jim's attention until he sees that we are serious about this. To that end, putting our manifesto on a web site is a very good idea.
As far as closing the ad, my intended design is that closing it would store a cookie that indicates to not show you any advertising on Craigslist. Beyond cookies, it could also be associated with your Craigslist account, though most users interface with Craigslist without signing up for accounts. It can only lower expected revenue, but the kind of people who want to close the ad are probably the kind of people who were not very likely to click the ad in the first place.
Edit: And yes, the title is absurdly long. I have a tendency to abuse title fields in social web apps when there is no effective limit.
So, I guess the first step is finding out how many people we need to get Jim's attention.
50K is a good guess but anything we can do to get a more accurate answer will help.
Your answer for closing the ad works. Is there anyway to find out more details about much that hurts the dollar value? I imagine that someone, somewhere runs ads like that.
You should be able to set an easy lower bound on this. You said, "With 20 billion pageviews a month, a Google Adwords banner would bring in about 200 million dollars a year." Just find actual quotes and keep track of the information. Shop around a bit.
Or find a volunteer around here willing to do it.
Is the permanent removal of the ad a necessary part of this?
No, but it minimizes the most obvious possible objection: "I don't want ads on Craigslist."
Is that really a forceful objection given that the response is "ONE BILLION DOLLARS FOR CHARITY. DON'T BE AN ASS."? And if we're just talking plane banner ads, not flashing "You're a Winner!" pop-ups it's hard to justify to loss in revenue.
Maybe some kind of compromise where clicking the x hides the ads for 24 hours? My sense is that a lot of people, when they first see the ads, will turn them off. But if once they get used to them they won't mind so much. I wouldn't want to lose a huge chunk of revenue just because people were initially bothered by the ads.
I think the objection is forceful enough to potentially derail the whole thing -- some people don't like ads, and if they don't want to see them, they should have that right without having to go and install an adblocker. Even if the objection isn't logical, it's still a very real objection that could and will be voiced.
There's one person objecting in the comments on this blog post about my first, failed attempt to do this. http://journal.markbao.com/2009/07/craigslist-advertising-for-charity/
I can't find it with a quick Google search -- though I will try again later -- but I have seen at least one site owner that did this optional advertisement thing with minimal impact on revenue.
Also, with this kind of thing, "permanently" closing the ad isn't really permanent. It's permanent until you clear your cookies or use a different browser. It is a shame to have to lose some revenue because some users won't just deal with the damn dust speck, but my intuition is that we're looking at a 20% decrease in revenue with this, a difference that could be made up by a better advertising sales team.
The loss of revenue hurts, but I don't think it's worth a chance of losing the whole thing because some people don't want to look at ads.
Reddit does well at unobtrusive ads. Their sidebar ads are easily blocked by adblock, and occasionally they'll just run an ad with a happy reddit alien saying "thank you for not using adblock!" -- a lot of reddit users have their adblock settings set specifically to allow ads from reddit, in order to support the site.
ETA: I suspect the ad would be closed less often if there were a note nearby naming the specific charity to which that ad was providing revenue.
Hmmm. Conceded. Since it looks like this was tried before and failed, I'd be interested to hear what you learned from the first attempt.
I learned that my initial copy was not viral to motivate people to join based on seeing the group name in their newsfeed. I learned that it is a whole lot easier to get someone to join a group than it is to invite their friends to join the group. I sent out a few mass messages encouraging people to invite their friends, but the third and final message I sent out resulted in a net loss in users for the group.
I do still have control of that group and it's 150 members, so it's a good enough place to focus test ad copy for the next group.