It's usually due to incentives and the time horizon you're optimizing for. If a manager is tasked with maximizing revenue over the next 12 months no matter what, then increasing the ad load is a lever you are probably going to pull.

If your goal is to create an enduring product that will slowly grow revenue and be around forever, then you're probably not backed by VCs or private equity, or you have a cash machine (google search, etc).

The reality is that some businesses shouldn't take VC money and shouldn't get so big. Maybe a wiki farm should just be a wiki farm profitably run by 5 friends or something.

It's the classic question of "how much of our brand did we sell to achieve this bump in revenue?".

Selling your brand is a very real thing, and I wish more people would take it into account. Brand health correlates with long term health.

> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.

That's part of the issue. There are very real financial rewards for short term gain; meanwhile vision and legacy have been greatly devalued at both the personal and corporate level.

How many CEOs do we honor for years of dedicated service and company growth? Respect is shown in the form of monetary compensation, and that's granted based on short term shareholder results.

And it doesn't help that some companies succeed in spite of their brand tanking (FAANG, etc.). Why would you care about your brand if it doesn't seem to be affecting your bottom line? The brand at that point is for the shareholders first and foremost, and what's a terrible brand to many consumers can be a great brand to investors (Facebook).

I’ve wondered about this wrt public transportation. They keep raising prices, making it less affordable for people. Eventually basically no one is riding, so they … raise prices.

It seems needlessly expensive to me to run empty busses. I’d like to see if cheaper transportation can actually make more money.

I’ve worked in media and digital advertising and, on multiple occasions, actually implemented ads on sites. The proper way to do it is to A/B test different ad SDK configurations (refresh rate, delay to initialization, etc) and measure the impact on various user engagement metrics (time on page, session duration, etc).

These metrics can sort of tell you how people are reacting to the ads, though it isn’t perfect obviously. At the very least, it will let you know how violently people are reacting to the ad experience, which is also a good indicator for how it will impact SEO.

Or course there’s an inverse relationship between ad revenue and user experience: with a very light ad experience you basically make nothing, with a very heavy experience you will make a lot in the short term but in the long term you will lose users, traffic, and ultimately money. If you do things right, you can strike a balance at least.

I’ve also managed websites that hired some outside firm who worked on a revshare basis to come in and load ads on the site, and they didn’t do this kind of testing, and though initial revenue was high their traffic ultimately tanked in a matter of months.

A big problem I’ve seen is you find a nice balance between revenue and UX and then that becomes the new baseline/control that future people start testing against. So slowly over time it’s a death by a thousand cuts.

Turns out a lot of business people are bad at business. It’s hard to even explain how these metrics work to less technical people and it takes a special company to just trust the engineers and turn down the short-term revenue.

They know what they are doing, they can burn an unpriced asset for short term gain, looks good on their balance sheet while they have screwed over the commons (their internal commons).

> If people and companies took the bigger picture in to account, they likely wouldn't do these things.

Its important to denote that this decision occurs at the moment they decide to take someone else's money and promise them a return on their investment. The loss of control and need to produce a return on that investment (or often, to "show growth" to get the next round of investment in a never-ending game of musical chairs) is what produces mandates like massive ads and enshittification.

Does Fandom need to own all wiki's? Do they need 300 employees? Do they need to own TVGuide, Metacritic, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs and a thousand different media publications? Hell no they don't, if their goal was to provide a useful service.

Unrelated but I put Forbes on a blocklist on my Google News feed because they almost intentionally epitomize the enshittification of the web. I can only imagine the horrors of browsing Forbes without an ad blocker, but even with an ad blocker, Forbes does some weird shit with my browser history. On Android, if I swipe, I either do a browser Go Back action, or if nothing to go back to, exit the browser. On Forbes, swiping takes me... Right to the page I was already on. I check my history stack, there's like five Forbes records. If I find the article interesting enough to share, I'd copy the URL... But for some reason, the URL is not even for the article I'm reading. It's for some totally unrelated article. How do I get the URL of the article I'm reading? This isn't rhetorical, I really want to know!!

Anyway, Forbes somehow went from a pretty decent source of news in my parents' generation, to some case study in how not to design a news site.

I think the technical term is enshittification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification