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John Lilly becomes Mozilla Corp. CEO
From current Mozilla Corp. CEO Mitchell Baker's blog, comes the announcement that she will no longer be the CEO. She is moving into a different role within the organization and current COO John Lilly will be the new CEO. "As a result I've asked John to take on the role of CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, and John has agreed. In reality John and I have been unconsciously moving towards this change for some time, as John has been providing more and more organizational leadership. It is very Mozilla-like to acknowledge the scope of someone's role after he or she has been doing it for a while, and this is a good part of what is happening here."
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About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 18:04 UTC (Tue) by sumC (subscriber, #1262) [Link] Have you changed your ad policy? That subscribers wouldn't need to see ads? And please don't allow animated ads at all(SonicWall), the most annoying kind :(
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 18:58 UTC (Tue) by leoc (subscriber, #39773) [Link] I have to disagree. Flash ads are WAY more annoying than simple animated gifs.
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 21:26 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link] I find animated images more annoying than flash ads because I don't have flash installed so I don't see them. ^_^ Thus I basically have a 100% effective blocker of flash ads. That said, I don't mind animated ads so much, they're a *lot* better than those in-text ads that were tried last year. Also in firefox, you can press ESC to stop all the animations on the page. It would be nice, though, to be able to log in to get rid of the ads. Subscribers shouldn't have to see them. Also, if lwn is going to do these sorts of ads they should probably put a little effort into integrating them into the theme of the website. This ad looks like it was just tacked in on top of a story.
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 19:29 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] I'd like to add: Money from advertisement come from the readers, not from advertisement buyers (that will only pay you a fraction of what they expect to make). So advertisement is a fee imposed on the reader. Of course, you can set whatever fee for access to your publication, this is not the issue. However, once you sell a subscription to someone for a set amount, you cannot ask for an extra fee during the course of the subscription.
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 19:39 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] So no subscription publication anywhere can legitimately run advertisements?
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 19:56 UTC (Tue) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link] This subscriber has no problem with ads. If the ads generate better revenues for the site, and thus the site can improve its content, then my subscription gains in value without any extra costs to me. The mere presence of third party commercial statements don't offend me and put me in touch with companies I would otherwise might not be interested in. Now this particular ad could be separated from the content of the news page a little better, but that is more of design tweak, and not a fundamental problem with the ad.
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 20:09 UTC (Tue) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] No opinion on that particular question, but you could exercise a little more editorial control. This particular ad is just distracting.
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 20:28 UTC (Tue) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link] Not only that, it's a bad one too, because it's an ad against Sonicwall and trying to promote an alternative. That isn't very nice in itself, but people like me who don't really read the ad well think it's for Sonicwall. And the ad is annoying enough to let me block all images from oasis.lwn.net, and that works contraproductive too. To make ad blocking easier and more selective you could use different subdomainnames depending on annoyance level: flashads.lwn.net, animatedgifsads.lwn.net, textads.lwn.net etc. On the other hand, if LWN becomes too ady, I'll probably give up my subscription instead. Can't you make a poll where you give readers the option between more ads or higher subscription cost? And also poll the opinion of non-subscribers, what's stopping them from subscribing, if they would mind more ads and so on.
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 20:57 UTC (Tue) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] A non-subscriber, I do not mind ads, as long as articles do not start getting split across multiple pages, and the ads do not cover the content or move relative to it. The (pre|ab)sense of ads would not affect my decision to subscribe.
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 23:58 UTC (Tue) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link] The question is: Do you block ads, are you banner blind, or something else?
About the advertisement Posted Jan 9, 2008 18:33 UTC (Wed) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] I am accustomed to seeing pages with ads and content interspersed, and finding the content; newspapers and magazines have been the same way. I guess it is sort of an acquired banner blindness.
About the advertisement Posted Jan 8, 2008 20:22 UTC (Tue) by sbdep (subscriber, #13282) [Link] By all means run advertisements, if they provide a source of revenue without having to great a cost in terms of subscriber loss. I have no problems with them in general as long as they are not overly distracting and don't hide the information we are trying to read. 2 concerns about the current Sonicwall ad. It is very distracting, something a little more subtle would probably be better. Hopefully this is somehting you can improve in the future with a good balance of editorial control without taking too much time. The second concer is that the way it is aligned with a news item made me at first think it was part of the item. Perhaps move it more to the side, but then you will presumably not meet your site design template for width of content. This is just an aesthetics issue I guess. A decent example of what control to have over advertisements and what to allow is IMO how Penny-Arcade manages the advertisements on their site. They, until recently, didn't allow animated things, and they only accept advertisements for products they actually support and can recommend themselves. So you won't ever see an ad on their site for something that they can't recommend themselves since anything that shows up on their site has their implicit approval.
Color me similar ... Posted Jan 8, 2008 21:15 UTC (Tue) by kmself (subscriber, #11565) [Link] Ads are OK, but they're best if they're relevant, text-heavy, and not annoying/distracting. I really, really, really dislike animated GIFs (and Flash is worse), and will tend to find a blocking strategy that works on pretty much any site that uses them, but that's just me. I do set GIFs to loop only once, and actually missed the animation. Had to reload the page just to see it, and have to say that the single-frame I first saw was much more effective than the animated version (I clicked through it). Also amusing to note that there's confusion over the vendor placing the ad based on the animation sequence. I do share sbdep's comment regarding the ad placement. I also first thought it was an adjunct to the content of the Mozilla article, and had to look at it twice before realizing it was in fact an ad. As viewed, LWN has a substantial right-side gutter which might be better used for ads. Also shared: don't split up long articles into multi-part sequences, merely for clickthroughs (true installments such as various special contributions, Grumpy Editor, etc., are of course OK).
It's NOT a Sonicwall ad! Posted Jan 9, 2008 0:06 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link]
Of course the first picture is the most effective, it's the that people see first. After that
they lose interest and move on. The advertisement doesn't work, because it advertises SW
instead of the intended firm/product...
So the animation is not only annoying, it doesn't increase the effectiveness either.
This is the second ineffective ad on LWN ("afvallen" being the other), I wonder if this
sadness will continue, or if the next one will be better.
If subscriber pays enough... Posted Jan 8, 2008 23:12 UTC (Tue) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link] "Starving Hacker" is probably not enough to remove advertisements (basically guy is too poor to even pay standard fee - he can pay in other ways). And I don't mind Google's ads at all. But these flashing ads... ugh...
If subscriber pays enough... Posted Jan 9, 2008 0:41 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Hear, hear! If our grumpy editors are at odds with Google for some reason, there are other text ad brokers.
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