Please sort out the ads, again

Not having problems with Ads as I’m only viewing them but I’ve had dozens of 502 Bad Gateway over the weekend and still earlier this afternoon when trying to view the Forums

Running 16.1.1 iOS

I am having the same issue trying to interact with the site on my iPad.  Scrolling results in vast blank screen gaps, very frequent critical error message, the old "can I use xGB (or whatever the figure is) on your device" requests and incredibly bad typing experiences.  I can type an entire sentence on the iPad and then just have to wait as the text box catches up....can be up to 20 seconds just waiting for the ghost typing to start.

I really don't mid seeing ads but as DT alluded to, I don't even bother now trying to access the site on the iPad, just now dip in every now and again on the work laptop.  I started (tried) a couple of threads but these just disappeared when I hit submit.  Maybe it's the iPad, it's quite old but STW just wrecks it, and it doesn't throw a hissy fit on any other sites I visit.

We have had some database caching problems over the weekend and today. That’s the reason for the slowness and 502 errors. Needless to say Anthony is doing his best to keep everything g running. Sorry for the performance issues. 

And where's the "X' gone from the interstitial adverts?

Now I don't know if I'm supposed to wait a few seconds and it disappear of it's own accord, click where the X used to be, or if the page has crashed and I'm just stuck with it, do I then hit refresh, or back, who knows.........

What happens if you go through the Bad Gateway?

2nd. This site is getting so bad I rarely visit now (I was a subscriber, but not now, which doesn't help) The ads will REALLY be hitting the casual browsers/newcomers.

What happens if you go through the Bad Gateway?

I’ve never come across a site quite as shonky as this one.

Yeah it won’t be the only site. 

True, but local news sites are a very low bar. My one is unusable without an ad blocker.

They’re absolutely shocking. 

Yeah it won’t be the only site. <br /><br />

but it’s not a race to come up with the most hateful unusable website?

Luckily mines been ok since a couple of weekends ago. I must have some good blocking stuff on our mesh network or something as it only happened staying at a hotel 

It’s the only site that I use having problems.  <br />New visitors click through numbers must be shocking. 

but it’s not a race to come up with the most hateful unusable website?<br /><br /><br />

Agreed but it’s not the only site is the point. 

Agreed but it’s not the only site is the point. 

it is however the only site I intentionally visit!  those other site are clickbait trash, where there objective is to suck you in and then have you generate ad revenue before you realise the the thing you’ll never believe, was in fact entirely believable.  If STW want to be as dreadful a user experience as them I wish they would just say so - so that we know we aren’t wanted and can log off one last time.  However even those sites don’t generate me “warning this site is consuming over 500 Mb of memory” or make my laptop heat up and fans whir like crazy. <br /><br />

We have had some database caching problems over the weekend and today. That’s the reason for the slowness and 502 errors. Needless to say Anthony is doing his best to keep everything g running. Sorry for the performance issues. <br /><br />

that explained the 502s but not the truely dreadful ad experience.  Is that intentional / strategic or are you/Anthony never experiencing what ordinary users see. If it’s not the company policy, but the best Anthony can do - I think, for what is a web business it’s time to ask if you have the right people in the job.  If Anthony is executing what he’s told to do then the management need to work out what they want to be.

I just got a 502 twice.

First time I've used the site since before the weekend as it was so slow - 20+ seconds to refresh a page.

Yeah.. sorry about these 502... We are having a bit of a nightmare here at the moment trying to find the root cause of it.

that explained the 502s but not the truely dreadful ad experience.  Is that intentional / strategic or are you/Anthony never experiencing what ordinary users see. If it’s not the company policy, but the best Anthony can do – I think, for what is a web business it’s time to ask if you have the right people in the job.  If Anthony is executing what he’s told to do then the management need to work out what they want to be.

That's a bit unfair. We do see what you see. We are aware of the issues you experience and as I've said many time in the past, if I can find a viable way of running the business without these ads are at the very least a great deal fewer, then I would. Unfortunately the ad market has crashed in the last 12 months and that's hit us very hard. It is taking time to develop replacement revenue streams in order to keep the lights on and right now turning off the ads would be the thing that tips things over the edge. But rest assured I and everyone here - especially Anthony and Andy - are doing everything we can to get the site running smoothly for everyone. 

Tonight between 6-7pm I'm going to turn the ads off completely by way of a small token of apology. 

Tonight between 6-7pm I’m going to turn the ads off completely by way of a small token of apology.

That's not a bad marketing ploy either, ads free Friday anyone? The paid version is way more useable (excepting the intermittent bad gateway issues etc.), maybe if the the free users actually see what it's like as a subscriber the £ 2.42 a month might not seem so expensive.

I never complain about the site because I'm a paid up member and my browser is well equipped. 90% of the time it just works like the old steam powered bone shaker that it is.

But... This weekend has been bad.

You should do a line of black and white '502 Bad Gateway' stickers or little enamel pin badges. Then when we spot eachother in public we'll know we have a common struggle.

One thing I find that happens frequently is the page refreshes by itself and eats whatever I've been typing at the time. If this is a common occurrence then it must be costing the site a lot of content. As an experiment I tried using the site with an ad blocker and the problem went away.

Of course, may reasonably argue that reducing my content is no bad thing.

I’ve never come across a site quite as shonky as this one.

I'll raise you https://www.lingscars.com/

One thing I find that happens frequently is the page refreshes by itself and eats whatever I’ve been typing at the time. If this is a common occurrence then it must be costing the site a lot of content. As an experiment I tried using the site with an ad blocker and the problem went away.

Of course, may reasonably argue that reducing my content is no bad thing.

I have also experienced the same.  Sometimes I retype - often I move on.

That’s a bit unfair. We do see what you see.

mark - sometimes a bit of brutal reality is needed; your site munches masses of resources on our devices, randomly reloads and has intrusive ads that cover up key functionality.  Despite that people keep coming back.  You’ve managed to get some people to subscribe, but you’ve probably driven more to use ad blockers which hurt your revenue.  But how many to you lose completely?  You had me as a subscriber way back in time - but the recurring logout issue took you so long to fix that I saw no benefit.  I believe it’s fixed now.

We are aware of the issues you experience and as I’ve said many time in the past, if I can find a viable way of running the business without these ads are at the very least a great deal fewer, then I would.

I mean the computational demand is not a new issue and countless other ad funded sites manage without the overheating and reloading issues - do you even know what causes them.  I’ve no idea what the ad economics are like these days - do they pay per click or per impression?  If it’s per click I suspect the mass overload and intrusion is counter intuitive.

does anyone do cryptomining or outsourced computation as a business model?  I’m serious if you are going to overheat my phone/laptop I’d rather it was doing something directly lucrative, that didn’t invade my visual experience.

I'm aware of the reality.

The ads you see are inserted using the same systems as every other site. Over 80% of the ads are put there by Google ADX, which is the standard programmatic systems used around the world. The performance issues over the last few days have had nothing to do with the ad system. For those with the tech knowledge it is a error somewhere in our config sys file that is causing REDIS to crash. Redis is a cache system that preloads/caches database queries so that when you click on a post or topic that request isn't made directly of the database. This speeds up content delivery and is really important on a site like ours with over 10 million database entries and on average over 10k page requests/hour.

Ads are necessary. I hate them and I want them gone. But they are currently paying our wages so I need to be careful. I've turned the ads off for the next hour ( I was a bit late so they will be off until 7:30pm). This will cost us financially - The demands on the ads system are currently at the highest point of the year right now.

Beyond that all I can suggest until I implement new revenue streams to replace the programmatic ads is that for 99p you can go ad free for the next 30 days. Use code STBF99 on a monthly digital.

I have a plan to improve the site significantly in the new year but currently I am trying to work out how to fund it. We hope to shift to Wordpress VIP, which is a hosted service that runs some of the worlds largest websites. There is a certain level of scale that is required before any site can migrate to that service but thankfully we already have the traffic levels needed. The problem is it means moving from a monthly payment for servers to a single and very large annual payment. The benefit to us is that the site would autoscale to demand and we'd have a service provider ensuring uptime. That would mean our two developers can actually develop instead of manage servers and uptime. For you guys that means an acceleration in actual development of features rather than hunting errors in the config files that bust our cache and cause massive frustration to you.

One interesting fact about ads on the internet. There's a myth that publishers get paid an amount for every 1000 impressions of an ad, which leads many to imagine that by viewing an ad that is enough to put money in the til. Unfortunately that's not the reality.
As a publisher google tells us that we've earned a set amount for each 1000 ad impressions but this statistic is actually a figure that is derived from the amount of money we've earned divided by the number of ads displayed. The majority of ads that an actual advertiser puts into the system through their Google ad account are set to only pay when there's a click. It's the clicks that generate the revenue. The total is then divided into the number of ad impressions and out pops this CPM number that is then reported to us publishers. It may look like we get paid for an ad view but the truth is that if no one ever clicked the ad then the amount per thousand views we get would be zero.
Now, advertisers do have the option to select a pay per view model but the majority do not select it as it doesn't give the best return on the ad budget. Paying per click is the best option in most cases.
So, TLDR version is that if you don't click an ad then no (very little) money is generated. The money publishers earn is from the users who interact with the ads.

I'm off for my tea now. Enjoy the ad free experience until I remember to turn them back on later 🙂

I simply can’t believe that there’s a myth on the internet.

Mark, here’s an observation that may, or may not be useful to you.  I don’t think I have ever intentionally clicked on an ad on STW.  That’s not out of spite - it’s because frankly they don’t seem to be that tailored to me (it’s surprising that the ads aren’t selling bikes, wood burners, Audis or other STW classics, but also don’t seem in anyway related to things I’ve looked at in recent times or which seem to be advertised on some other sites).  In contrast Facebook seems to have got worryingly good at showing content that tempts me in to click it… no idea what scope or control you have on that.

I know a/b testing is not trivial to implement but you might want to experiment and see if you get more clicks by showing less ads?  Might sound counter intuitive but when there’s three ads on screen at once I can only possibly focus on one - which given your lack of selectivity it might be the “wrong one”.  That said, given the lack of relevance if everyone is the same - perhaps a lot of your clicks (revenue) are just big thumbs on small X buttons?

@Mark  I know you will object to this, but I suspect there are a lot of us that would chip in to help some upfront costs of the change.

I'd make a story of it and politely ask for donations to the cause.

There is already I donate some pennies link somewhere I hear you say but, it isn't obvious and sometimes just a little ask is worth it.

If for sake of argument, 20% of the paid members donated a fiver, would that help in a significant way?

That’s very nice of you twonks. Essentially we need a 17% increase in subs - that’s the calculation I did. Doesn’t sound much but it’s about 1000 new subs. In terms of crowdfunding it our subs are a ready made crowdfunding system.

you are right that we don’t make much fuss about our donate options one of which is the option for any subscriber to change the amount of their next renewal in their account settings.

anyway, I’m afraid I’m turning the ads back on now Bake off is starting

I’d happily follow the suggestion by Twonks and help by paying more for my subscription.

I have tried in the past to pay more and ended up getting a card with a voucher on it, but I was just trying to pay more to help.

I’m a daily reader of the site and for me I’d happily pay more to ensure you guys survive.

@Mark  Not sure what you're doing with the BAT you get from Brave users, but if I were you I'd be sitting on it just now and not turning it to cash each month.  Mid to late 2024 there's a good chance it could be above $1 or even higher (current price is around $0.2).  It could also end up being worth even less but I'm assuming you're not relying on it to keep the lights on each month.

Not sure how much BAT you actually get each month or how much you're holding though.  I still think it might be a good idea to try to nudge subscribers towards Brave (tell them to remember to switch on rewards, I recently reinstalled and it took me a month to realise I hadn't seen any adverts) but I also get the obvious reason you wouldn't want to do that.

Edit: Just remembered, there's a forum just for members, isn't there?  You could put a tutorial on that if people who were already subscribed wanted to contribute more.  Although I'm not sure if anyone uses it, do they?

However even those sites don’t generate me “warning this site is consuming over 500 Mb of memory”

Chrome shows memory usage on tabs these days. I've just hovered over a few. Outlook:392MB. LinkedIn:129MB. YouTube:182MB. Mastadon:172MB. GamesRader:44MB. Facebook:163MB. This STW tab:97MB.

I don’t think I have ever intentionally clicked on an ad on STW.

The number of times I've clicked on an ad at all must be vanishingly rare. I'm surprised it's still a viable income source, though of course it must be or no-one would bother.

I posted a similar thread to this a couple of weeks back and for some reason that thread was closed.

My free experience isn’t too bad , I’m not sure why I don’t get too many infuriating ads that stop me seeing content. But when I  was away a couple of weekends ago for some reason I got the full ad experience ad it was impossible to even see forum content. I gave up even knowing that the content was good under the ads. Someone new wouldn’t even stay. <br /><br />
This was a couple of weeks back if I tried to click on the Drac thread that vid would jump across and block it

Historically I had this sit serve me up UKIP adverts, more recently betting sites. No surprise they’re not getting click through.

I’ve never come across a site quite as shonky as this one.

I’ll raise you  https://www.lingscars.com/

Nope, that works really well, loads in an instant, and doesnt have ads over the content.

Side bar ads wouldnt be anywhere near as intrusive, but the overlay ones you get here are the most intrusive, and surely you dont get any income from them (I’m under the impression that we have to click on them for ST to get any revenue). The current ads I see here do not have any relationship to what I browse. Why isnt there good quality ads about medium prices full sus bikes, or wet / cold weather gear? I would click on them, as I want a new jacket and trews.

I’ve just opened 2 threads from here, one has an ad from ‘Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen’, and another page has ‘Royal Caribean cruises,’ and ‘Visit Australia’, none of them are ever going to get clicked by me, have ever been searched by me, or hold any interest at all for me. I also get a lot of ads for an army surplus store. I was looking for a work coat around 2 years ago, and did buy an ex army jacket. (It was shiiite), but I havent looked again, why are these ads showing? Is it because of the searches 2 years ago, or is it random, like the Louisiana and Australia ads?  You need to target better, I cannot recall clicking on any of the ads from the ST site. Not because I dont spend money, but because none of the ads are relevant.

Good (and bad) to hear I'm not alone.

Like I said I don't mind ads, and I know it helps drive revenue for the site so thats fine

The problem is the customer experience of the site if the ads splurge across the content, prevent content from loading or cause replies to be lost due to reloading this needs to get sorted.  Appreciate there maybe other technical reasons going on, but like I said no other site I use (and no I don;t use those awful local news sites) are like this.

I used to be a regular poster, so someone helping support content, which if we honest a lot of people are here for rather than the print mag.

The CX creates a barrier to people who want to help with content, which will help with engagement.  Some people, long termers, will persist and do their best to work with it.  Newbies just won't bother.

Ads (and other glitches) mean the fundamental requirement of a user to create, read and respond to content is painful for some.

I hope your financial woes get better, many of us are in the same boat.  Sorting the user experience has got to be a priority - increase content and engagement and therefore hopefully up your conversion rate to premium

Reduce barriers, improve CX = more content & engagement = more users = revenue

More Ads & glitches = worse CX = less content & engagement = fewer users = death spiral

(normally I'd charge for that advice...)

FunkyDunc, That must be a screen shot from a week or so ago. Those ads were wrong and shouldnt have appeared. I contacted EZoic about that and they were the result of a so called 'upgrade' at their end with their video system.

As for targeting, we don't do any targeting - that's down to Google not us. Also, here's our default settings regarding politics and betting. So no idea how those made it into your browser.

Apologies for those.

Click rates (CTR) have been steady for years at around 0.4% So for every 1000 impressions of an ad 40 people may click it. We can see the click numbers and that's what we typically see. That's considered pretty standard.

Typically an advertiser may pay £1 per click (that varies depending on keyword targeting and many other factors including time of year). Google takes 40% of that before it reaches a publisher.

I'll let you do the maths on that 🙂

It is becoming almost unusable. Between every item on the site i click on, i get an ad that i then have to click past to progress. Each step takes 5-10 secs. Its becoming harder now and more tedious so yep it is starting to put me off visiting.

I'm intrigued to know who these 4 in a 1000 are, who actually click on these ads? There can't be many, if any visitors here who see that technicolour horror show and think 'ooh that's interesting, just what I need'. My money is on accidental clicks with a fat thumb on a small screen. In fact I've done it myself a few times with the CRC banner at the top and that's as an ad free subscriber. Indeed the ad on top of ad on top of content approach seems contrived to induce unintended clicks. I know that's down to the ad supplier and not STW choice.

Click rates (CTR) have been steady for years at around 0.4% So for every 1000 impressions of an ad 40 people may click it

I wonder how many of those are me trying to find the tiny x in the corner of the video.

Up until around March this year I worked in TV and commissioning is down something obscene like 80% due to the combined effects of the economy and the writers strikes. Advertising sucks, the lack of it sucks even more. Trouble is, there's never a lack of it to the consumer, it's just the quality drops. You go from a high advertising cost (because the time of add breaks and number of page impressions is finite), promoting decent well targeted adds, for products you might actually want and go on to buy. Down to the sort of crap that Mark showed on the tick list on the previous page, things that only become economically viable if you can get millions of viewers for pence on the pound of the normal cost.

To the end users though it's still just 2 minutes of adverts in the middle of a show, it's just the show is now cheaper and the adverts more irritating.

I think we're entering the end game when it comes to the current ad-based business model where we give away our data so we can get free stuff.

Youtube's recent attempts to get rid of ad-blockers is a sign of desperation, imo, and if YT can't make it work I don't know who else will be able to.

I guess the big question is what comes next?

@brucewee - I truly hope so. I'm sick of relying on this kind of advertising

I guess the big question is what comes next?

I've been wondering this as well.  It's arguable that the need for news sites to drive clicks means they promote controversial content more than they ever used to and that could be part of the problem with modern politics.  I would guess we move to an internet where part of your subscription is given to the sites you visit, a bit like modern streaming.  

It is becoming almost unusable. Between every item on the site i click on, i get an ad that i then have to click past to progress. Each step takes 5-10 secs. Its becoming harder now and more tedious so yep it is starting to put me off visiting

I mistakenly went to browse the site on a device Im not logged into (STW) yesterday, and yes, basically unusable. 

Interesting point.  I must say I had noticed youtube had ramped up the ads massively, to the point I've been looking for something else for content.  I don't have an ad blocker installed as I know that ads help support various sites I use, but, there is a balance to be had.

Oh and another small bit of advice, and I'm sorry if this comes across patronising its well intended.  Feel free to ignore if you've already done your due diligence

In my line of business I often see clients that believe that moving to the next tech platform XYZ will solve all their problems with their existing platform they spend £(millions) implementing the new tech, but keep the same failing model and processes.  So, now they have new tech, which no one understands, a big dent in the wallet and are mostly in the same position they were in before.  I'd hate to see this happen to STW.

Make sure you are super sure about moving to new tech is the thing you need to do, web/cms aren't my specialities, but maybe there are a few on STW who are experts, and who will volunteer some detailed advice for free to help you - its always good to talk to outsiders to get a potentially different viewpoint to help with your decision making.

You don't want ads?
Take out a subscription.
If you won't take out a sub, stop complaining.

We hope to shift to WordPress VIP, which is a hosted service that runs some of the worlds largest websites.

Re-engineering or just a ‘lift and shift’ to a new platform? If the latter it may be like putting lipstick on a pig. I thought one of the main issues was the quick and dirty patches that have been applied over the years which has created a huge ‘tech debt’ that needs addressing?

Thanks for the advice there DT78 but we've been in the CMS tech game for 23 years and are experts at running a massive site on next to nothing. Don't worry about the due diligence, we've been working on this for months already. We are on Wordpress already. The move is to Wordpress but with a lot of support from the service that will free up our tech to do better things, so we are pretty confident in the strategy and there have been a lot of meetings to date with Wordpress VIP techy to techy. The remaining issue is how we fund the move. It's effectively the same annual cost as we pay now but just no longer split into 12 monthly payments. But like all decisions there's risk. All we can do is do what we can and use what we know to minimise the risks as much as we can.

If the latter it may be like putting lipstick on a pig.

Christ, don't do that. The last thing STW needs is David Cameron.

I'd put less links to articles in the sidebar and couple more rotating links to merch - you'd barely know you had a shop if you didn't go looking for it.

Especially at this time of year.

Might ballance out the resident politics "experts" a bit.

Would make a nice print on a STW T-shirt?