Hey everyone, your old pal Matt here. As the publisher of The Autopian, it’s my job to make sure we have enough money to operate. One of the ways we do that is with advertising. Another way we do that is with membership. As a journalist and a fan of all the writers here, I much prefer the membership route to random display ads.
Last week, I went to a conference as a guest focused on ad tech. It was quite the eye-opening experience. I’ll explain my reasoning in a minute, but the general conclusion I came to was that we probably need to be a little more dynamic with our ads for non-members, and we should definitely work harder to make the experience much better for paying members.
That means we’re turning off autoplay on videos for members right now. If you’re a logged-in member and are reading a post, it’s your choice if you want the video to play or not. We’re now merging our Instagram content with our video offerings on mobile and otherwise experimenting with how to make the player more useful for everyone. Because we produce a lot of Instagram videos, this has fit nicely into our routine. On desktop, feeding the player mostly requires putting up more 16×9-oriented videos, and we’ve been slow to do that (thus, if you come here often, there’s a lot of repetition).
The way these players work is that they need to have high visibility in order to actually make money (this is why non-members get a player that follows them around the page). The best way to ensure high visibility, I believe, is to have great content that matches what you’re reading. We’re doing ok at that, but could be better. The other way to do it, and the way used by basically every website on the planet, is to autoplay the video. Ad tech people hope you like the video being shown, but they need you to watch a bunch of ads, or they don’t make any money.
I want us to make money. In addition to being sustainable, I think media can be a good business if more power is put into the hands of the creators. I want to prove this. Doing so means taking power away from those who merely see content as something to be optimized and monetized, and not actually enjoyed. We’re extremely lucky that everyone here believes in what we’re doing both editorially, as well as seeing the big commercial potential, and that the two are connected.
This is another step we’re taking to show that readers, when given a choice, will support publications that build community and listen to them. Members complained about the autoplay, so for now it’s off. If you’re not a member, seeing the ads is a part of how you contribute, but the way this works, you’d have to read thousands of articles to provide as much monetary backing as becoming a member at the lowest annual level.
If you like to read this site and are not a member, but want to become one (or you let your membership expire): click this link or add the coupon code noplay to your membership purchase, and I’ll give you $10 off any annual plan. That means for less than $ 4 a month, or a cup of very cheap coffee, you can support the Autopian by becoming a Cloth Annual member.
Either way, thank you for being here!
Top photo: depositphotos.com
It’s about time you stopped wasting our mobile traffic (I have heaps, but not everybody may be so lucky) on stupid videos we don’t watch.
Now if you could fix the idiotic comment notification system that does not let you access your replies on mobile at all, and constantly sends you notifications on the desktop unless you delete the comment notifications? That would be great.
And the whole shebang is so darn slow.
Maybe move the whole thing to WordPress and be done with it.
Oh, absolutely, I’d consider paying for a membership-just as soon as you stop flogging imperial measurements like it’s 1825. Until then, I’ll keep enjoying the pleasure of converting cubic feet to civilised units myself.
And as for ads, my trusty adblocker ensures I wouldn’t even notice the “enhanced experience.” Cheers all the same.
Oh, yes, and that too. Just stop using these stupid customary (not imperial — those are different) units and use sane units, that would be fine.
I mean, the customary units are defined as funny multiples of SI (“metric”) units anyway. Have been since the mid-1800’s. (Even if the US changed the funny multiples on the inch once.) Might just use sane SI units instead.
Read thousands of articles per year? yea that sounds about right, 8 per day (everything except the MD), x365 days, subtract Sundays and you get
~2500.
I saw you have a YouTube channel, you should definitely tell everyone you have that.
Well, this is a great post for me to vomit my biggest problems (from my POV) that I (a douchey velour level supporter) wish you, the boss, could get addressed.
I’m too old to figure out the programming to handle a website that handles comment threads perfectly, but this one deserves better than what we have now. But I have ideas.
Whoever webmaster this gets to, I have two suggestions.
Teach your spelling checker to acknowledge Autopian as is instead of suggesting “A utopian,” “Autoplan” or Utopian.
I hate red scribbles under words when I type, as they remind me of the letters I wrote home from college and my mom sent them back with red ink corrections from her newspaper editor days. I’m okay. Now, onto my biggest gripe:
When I get to the end of an article and scroll past the mini-bio of who wrote it, can YOU PLEASE show the first chronological page comment/response/correction. NOT the most recent. The original. And then we can scroll down through rebuttals, enhanced knowledge etc.
I have lost count of how many comments users have posted that are “sorry, already said.” Which make the second or third or how many people feel redundant. Which is unpleasant, especially if you’re an employee in the UK or Australia. There, it means you’re losing your job.
And then show, an option that to read the second level responses to the first level responses. Rather than clutter up the screen with a bunch of stuff that isn’t interesting to us, the end user.
And I say all this as a base-level velour member. So, not as an investor, but also not a zero-level feces-thrower.
And, while you’re at redesigning “THE Autopian” 2.0 or whatever version you are working on, maybe give us an opportunity to just give a thumbs up, or a heart or a laugh or a steaming pile, without having to do an actual reply that just clutters up more elaborate responses.
No, if we’re talking comments, the single best change that could be made is to allow users to sort comments by up votes, not just chronologically.
I would rather see comments in the order they were written, oldest first, to not repeat something someone else already said. But an option to do it your way isn’t a bad idea.
Spellcheck is based on your web browser, not the website. If you want it to recognize Autopian, right click on the word and add it to the spellcheck dictionary.
Seemingly, that’s not an option on MS Edge. But I didn’t realize it was a browser thing. I’ll look into that further. Thanks.
Edit: here’s how in Edge
How to Use Microsoft the Edge Dictionary | Edge Learning Center
I’m a member and welcome this change, but I don’t agree with it being limited to members only.
Autoplay videos are one of the shittiest attention grabbing methods on the internet. I (and many others) have modified my browser to never allow this behavior anyway, so I don’t think it’s as effective as advertisers think. It’s pure arrogance from publishers.
I also remember the article with your EIC pushing to “think mobile first”. The autoplay video that follows you down the article makes this website entirely unreadable on mobile.
I love seeing The Autopian go in the right direction and I was hoping the membership model allowed you all some more flexibility in being less shitty.
So far you’re striking a decent balance, although the slow creep of native advertising in the form of “partner posts” is a step in the wrong direction.
The “partner posts” are well defined. I appreciate that. If you don’t want to pay any attention/time to them its is well marked and easy to identify. I’d much rather have something like that than sneaky product placement or pseudo reviews that are paid for but not identified.
I was ready to watch ads on purpose, in a dedicated way, as long as they were at a precisely defined location – beginning or end, or dedicated page.
Yes, dedicated page – we are fans enough to spend a few minutes a day to go there and watch ads to help.
What I could NOT do however was bear with those automated Autopian TV inserts in the middle of EVERY article, mixed with pics and sometimes – with videos that were relevant to the article itself.
Much worse – t’was the time when Jason or was it someone else was in those ads (possibly for some event), so those videos looked even MORE relevant to the articles – till you realized they were ads or at least – completely unconnected to the article at hand.
This genuinely impacted my ability to follow the articles. So now I have all the possible add-ons to cut these.
If you throw all your ads on a single page (still keep them in the articles, I can’t see them there anyway) – I promise I’ll go and watch them. Possibly from a different browser, with all the cookies you want.
Wait, wait, wait. A website unshittified itself? That’s actually possible?
You glorious people. So glad I subscribed way back when.
To clarify: the Autopian is definitely NOT shitty. I’m referring to enshittification, where things get worse mostly on purpose. Cory Doctorow came up with the term. Think of how VW went with capacitive buttons. Enshittification.
I think the free content model has proved itself to be a dead end. What started enthusiastically in the 2000s as a free content bonanza gave way to reality, which is that you always get what you pay for. Go and thrive you bastards, may you become the top gear trio of auto blogging.
Though we’re all in the know,
let’s us again thank Beau!