Tag: ads

New to SSB: Horrible Horrible Ads!

We figured it was time to ca$h in on our burgeoning popularity and put ad$ in the $idebar! Wahhaha! We are to be gazillionarie$!

No seriously, while we’re testing some ways to bring in at least a little income (maybe a podcast?), we don’t expect to make more than a few dollars from the sidebar ad, which is provided by the ComicAd Network. But ComicAd has some things about it that I like. It was inspired by Ryan North’s late, lamented Project Wonderful, a terrific little ad system that used to adorn the sidebar of Metafilter for readers who weren’t logged in.

It’s about as unobtrusive as you can get for ads, it doesn’t track users (that’s really big in this privacy-conscious era), and the things it advertises are small projects, like ours. I think that good ads can provide a useful service, both to sites and users, provided no one gets too greedy. Lots of the excesses on the internet nowadays are caused by just that, greed, driving people to excess. A small image advertising a webcomic isn’t that bad, and may even be fun. Blanketing sites with ads for a vast exploitive Microsoft-sponsored AI company that drinks up rivers and floods the world with slop, that’s what we who like to put judgemental names on things call evil.

It also matters how they’re presented. Something I personally loathe is the suddenly-appearing, page-covering dialog box, usually with a big SUBSCRIBE button, and a tiny almost-invisible X in a corner somewhere. I notice with some annoyance that even the new batch of creator-driven new web media sites do this a lot. Anyway. I place that qualm onto a small boat made of folded paper, and with my breath I push it out into the ocean. Fwoooo!

This is an experiment, and it might disappear in the coming weeks, or change form. If you have an ad blocker and decide you don’t want to see it, that is fine. As I said, we’re not getting much money from this, at least not right now. If you have comments, concerns, qualms, caveats, issues, problems, etc., please use the comment form below to let us know. Thank you.

Something About Youtube Ads

This is only incidentally about video games, but games are frequently advertised on Youtube.

You might have noticed a particular Youtube ad that, for whatever reason, you might want to make a record of. Or you want to watch it again to get details; maybe you want to save a local copy with youtube-dl or yt-dlp for some purposes, maybe to remix. Or maybe for some reason even vote on it, or leave a comment on it.

A secret fact about Youtube ads is that they’re all secretly just normal Youtube videos that have been registered with the ad system to put them into rotation. Every video you see on Youtube has its own 11-character ID, and ads are among them. If you know an ad’s ID, you can load it like any other video by putting it after the string:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=

in the URL.

How can you get an ad’s ID? When it’s playing, pause it (one of the few things you can do in the player when an ad is being shown), then right-click the video and select Stats For Nerds.

That will get you various bits of troubleshooting information about the video currently being played:

Where it says Video ID/ sCPN, that code after it, that’s the ad’s ID! That’s the code you paste at the end of the URL line to get to the video’s landing page. You can select it right out of the info box with the mouse and copy it to the clipboard with CTRL-C:

Notice, the ad video itself is unlisted. It isn’t always, but it’s rare for an ad to appear in Youtube’s discover interface anyway. Also, this video doesn’t have voting disabled. It’s off the bottom of the screen here, but its comments are even open. An amusing aspect of this is, before I got to watch this ad as a normal video, Youtube served me a different ad immediately before it.

Because of this, if you find a silly, ridiculous or awful ad, you can find its page on Youtube and watch it again, tell others about it, sometimes even leave comments that probably no one will ever read.

For example. Here’s an infamous video that made the rounds some months ago. “Give this man seven seven draws!” (The caption says 777 draws.)

“Is that not enough? Give him some legendary Heroes at well!” I’m confused as to what a “draw” is, or why I’d want 777 of them, but a random lady in a business suit told it to me so it must be important!

It’s been labeled as unlisted and comments are turned off, but they didn’t bother to mark the video as non-embeddable. The ad campaign is over I think, but the video is still on Youtube, where it could possibly stay until the sun grows dim. The page says it’s currently been seen 3.6M times but it has no vote score, so it seems that getting served as an ad increases its view count.

This video, with the descriptive name “MLV109 EN 1920×1080 PC,” promoting the game “Grand Mafia” showcases the adventures of a poor Level 1 Crook, who’s constantly being turned down in his sudden marriage proposals to Hot Babes and Ex-Girlfriends because his level is low compared to the high level types that he’s surrounded by.

Hero Wars has been a heavily advertised game for months, sometimes with pretty gross ads. Badly animated blue hero guy is constantly injured by all the monsters and gods in his dumb generic fantasy world because he never went to school and learned about the important math concept of greater than. Because of that, his girlfriend got turned into a toilet and smashed to pieces. Stay in school, kids!

Commodore 64 Ads Retrospective

This is not a real ad, it’s a reimagining, but it’s pitch-perfect.

Bryan Lunduke has a collection of old ads for what is still the best-selling model of personal computer of all time, the Commodore 64. No doubt it retains that title today on the basis of a number of technicalities, like PCs are atomized among many different makes that still all run the same OS, and people not considering an iPhone to be a computer somehow.

I’d like to draw your attention in particular to the ad for GEOS on that page, the early C64 windowed operating system that breathed new life into the system. In the end it was probably doomed due to a number of factors: Apple’s head start and much better marketing, the fact GEOS had to be booted from disk while Mac OS was partly ROM-resident, and a bit of clunkiness. But you can do rather a lot with GEOS all by itself, and it comes with a capable word processor in GeoWrite. GEOS, and its weird legacy, probably deserves a post of its own eventually.

The image above is for a fake ad, but it’s based off of an iconic, and slightly disturbing, television ad from Austrailia, Keeping Up With The Commodore: