Request disclosure of ad revenue to quell "greedy" attacks

[Noah]

I've read the warning from the moderator in the last thread he locked concerning this recent Noscript snafu. And I agree.

Although after reading Giorgio's apology & hearing he has tons of email to sift & and personally reply to, I'm trying to get this thought to him sooner than he might land upon it via that avenue. Also I don't have a clue where to obtain Giorgio's email & I also presume his PM inbox on this forum is full too unless he has blocked PMs to the admin.

If that same moderator is reading, I ask that you leave this up until Giorgio can see & reply to it. Just want to see if he can arrange for this idea. I think once the figures are out, people can end the 2nd part of the controversy: greed. If you think users may try to flame Giorgio via this thread, I ask that you lock it so that he can still view it & reply to it as that is the main purpose of the thread.

So I ask that you fully disclose [or least give recent figures] on how much money you've made from ad revenue starting from 2008 & this partial 2009. Obviously, we're going to have to take your word for it since only you have access to to those figures. But this would complete the honesty of the apology. After all, you definitely need money to maintain hosting/bandwidth of the noscript/flashgot sites and their support boards [including this one] - so no one can argue with that. So, if you could, could you roughly explain these costs in actual figures per site/per forum? Most people think that since you have AMO to help give the author free bandwidth & hosting, that you shouldn't need that much money to have had a potentially ulterior motive behind implementing the changelog tab after every update [which is nice, but annoying to many people - as some just don't care or are more irritated by extra tabs] since the majority of traffic visits AMO rather than http://flashgot.net/ or http://noscript.net/. I can vouch for the level of hate on the "Firefox has Updated" tab - I've seen 100s of complaints about that after providing volunteer support @ http://support.mozilla.com/forum.

So I just ask that you consider that. I'm not saying addon authors aren't entitled to any money/profit. But it would be nice to see, since which ever version you updated NoScript to include the changelog tab after updates, how much that boosted your ad revenue just from having the ad loaded without many clicks [perhaps even how much you get paid per ad vs a click or a load]. You do have a NoScript userbase of at least 47 million [and 63 mill for Flashgot] according to AMO, give or take a few million away for reinstalls, so you can see how people may get the wrong idea.

That's gotta be some crazy traffic to get on a consistent basis by the way. I couldn't even imagine 1 million people being alerted to a addon update of any kind, then 1 million users downloading that update at the same time. Blows my mind.

Anyway, let me know. Thanks for the consideration.

[Alan Baxter]

I think it's desirable to leave this topic open to additional comments, Noah. Giorgio will still see your request. He and the rest of us can freely ignore any posts which are merely flames. We've had lots of practice doing that lately.

[Mandy]

... But this would complete the honesty of the apology. After all, you definitely need money to maintain hosting/bandwidth of the noscript/flashgot sites and their support boards [including this one] - so no one can argue with that.

Except that is exactly what people will do, argue with that. They will use that, as they have with his apology, to beat him with a stick of his own making. Plus, what exactly has it to do with you or anyone else?

You do have a NoScript userbase of at least 47 million [and 63 mill for Flashgot] according to AMO, give or take a few million away for reinstalls,

You have, I suspect inadvertently, given the real reason for this whole sorry business in that sentence. Writing advanced addons for Firefox is not easy and is not fun, it is hard work. To motivate yourself to the level of work required, every author has a reason. In some cases, it is ad revenue, with some it is prestige, with some it is to be #1. But, there is always a reason.

So, NoScript has a userbase of 47 million? No, it hasn't. The explanation that follows is as much for the Mods here to be able to understand how AMO and the addons author side actually works - every time an addon is updated, around 80% of existing users of that addon will update to it. In addition, every time an addon is updated there will be a surge of downloads as existing users update to it. This has the effect of putting an addon higher up the weekly downloads charts than it otherwise might be. As new users are always attracted to popular addons, this has the effect of attracting more new users.

Thus, an addon that has been downloaded 10 million times, may actually have a userbase of 1 million users once it has been updated just 10 times, allowing for 20% falling by the wayside and being replaced by 20% new users, ad infin. Every single extension and theme author on AMO knows this is how it works.

How is all this the real reason behind all this? Just put yourself in the position of an extension writer whose motivation was not revenue, but a determination to be #1 at any cost. Can you all see how it would eat into a certain type of person to see a closely competing extension being updated almost every week? While all of you here have been diverted by talk of ad revenue, the real reason for all this was under your noses - the download figures.

Just my 2 cents, hope it gives you all some understanding of what you are dealing with.

[GµårÐïåñ]

All my time here, I have close ONE thread and it was the one where people just slung mud and was going no where and I explained why I did it. When I was told to leave it open by the person taking the abuse, I let it be. Why does everyone coming here assume we close and block posts, for the love of god we allow you people to post anonymously at the expense of hours of fighting spam, so what is with all the assumptions to the negative. geez freakin hell.

[Giorgio Maone]

@Noah:
Thanks for the advice but no, thanks.

... But this would complete the honesty of the apology. After all, you definitely need money to maintain hosting/bandwidth of the noscript/flashgot sites and their support boards [including this one] - so no one can argue with that.

Except that is exactly what people will do, argue with that. They will use that, as they have with his apology, to beat him with a stick of his own making. Plus, what exactly has it to do with you or anyone else?

Thank you Mandy for summarizing briefly what I was about to write in a much more verbose and convoluted way.

So, NoScript has a userbase of 47 million? No, it hasn't.

This statement is very correct, but not for the reasons you believe.
NoScript is a "low retention" extension, i.e. many people install it because security experts are fond of it (and because objectively many web security issues, like XSS or Clickjacking, are effectively addressed by NoScript only).
Only a small fraction of them keep it installed, because it takes a bit of initial patience to "train it" according to your browsing habits, i.e. building your customized whitelist.

The explanation that follows is as much for the Mods here to be able to understand how AMO and the addons author side actually works - every time an addon is updated, around 80% of existing users of that addon will update to it.

Correct.

In addition, every time an addon is updated there will be a surge of downloads as existing users update to it.

Nope. Updates don't get counted in AMO download statistics, not in the general nor in the weekly ones.
The "Most popular" lists are sorted by fresh installs, not total downloads, because updates are left out.
Therefore, your theory correlating update frequency and charts is wrong, albeit suggestive (of a different form of greed).

NoScript's update frequency, notwithstanding the way it has been slandered and vilified by those who believe NoScript is just a switch for JavaScript, has one and only reason: to keep it constantly up to date.

"Up to date" here means timely responsive to any emergent security web threat which I could imagine a countermeasure for, and constantly trying to improve the balance between usability and security for my users. This has implied releasing very frequent, even daily, development builds (not automatically pushed) to address things like false positives or plugin incompatibilities, and a fair compromise has found as coalescing these improvements in automatic updates every 7-10 days.

Given the fact that more than once NoScript pioneered countermeasures for threats which were initially deemed "untreatable", and that similar feature only far later were implemented by mainstream browsers often as rip-off or poorly executed publicity stunts (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1421 or http://hackademix.net/2009/01/28/ie8s-c ... n-exposed/ ) you can see how complex and demanding this task becomes for essentially one guy alone, if the "competitor" often left behind is no less than the major software giant on the planet.

So, after all Mandy's conclusion is correct: main motivation is trying to be over the top, but it's not about charts.

[jogo]

NoScript is a "low retention" extension, i.e. many people install it because security experts are fond of it (and because objectively many web security issues, like XSS or Clickjacking, are effectively addressed by NoScript only).

Not to repeat myself, same question as presented here, but targetted to the security experts: http://forums.informaction.com/viewtopi ... 3809#p3809

[Nan M]

A comment about the advertising model for web income:

That's the reality. The web is advertising, for better or worse. Just the same as the street is advertising, one way or the other.
It is that way because web content is consistently not valued by users enough to fund site operation in general.
And I am not discounting the various ethical approaches of different advertisers, but that's not part of the main point here.
For better or worse, too, the Ggle model of targeting and selling ads is the main acceptable face of funding the web now. In particular it funds small concerns, and has developed a fairly exploitative routine around that area.

Before putting a single site operator in the dock about their income from web ads, it would be advisable to firstly state how often the questioner uses web sites (details of each site and frequency - or a cumulative rundown would be more in line with what the user is wanting in the way of a total of income over a period for the NS site owner), what kind of value that use constitutes to the questioner, if use of the sites could ever be considered unfair overloading of resources (maintenance of hardware, site, commercial registration legals, and personnel is all included here) if no pay for use is made, how many sites the questioner themselves has funded purposively, and to what amount.
When the jury has considered all that, it will probably be about time to then go to Ggle and ask them how much they earned from display ads on the NS site.

Just saying, you know.

[Noah]

I agree, Nan. Recently I have taken notice of how Google operates, and they're getting worse. Not to mention half-assed attempts [a plugin & temporary cookie] at letting users opt out of being tracked thru interest-based ads.

After you opt out, Google will not collect interest category information and you will not receive interest-based ads. You will still see the same number of ads as before, and Google may still show relevant ads based on the content of a web page, or other non-personal information.

Guess that's the price to pay for Gmail & other free Google apps. Even though you'll still get the same number of ads, they can't be bothered to save the preference to your google account on their servers.... /endvent

I guess I'd still like to know when the Changelog tab after Noscript updates aka "welcome page" was included, since the changelog doesn't show it. Since its pretty obscure to disable that unless a you're a advanced/power user who knows about about:config and can find & toggle off noscript.firstRunRedirection as is noted in the FAQ. A typical user is not going to be fooling around in there. So under the impression many people won't be able to turn off the new tab, and decide to just live with it, I see the lure of the approach. Of course, a 46 million userbase is unlikely given extension reinstalls, hit-it-&-quit-it users, etc factors but its got to be at least 1 million. Now I don't know how much money is derived from simply displaying an google ad, but I didn't realize they were google ads to begin with; which are not that bad but contain useless/sketchy offers. I assumed he was using other types of more notorious ads.

By the way, I'm getting a consistent Warning: Script Unresponsive error @ Script: http://ads.doclix.com/adserver/serve/js ... nit.js:120 as of the writing of this post, on the changelog page. Might want to look into that.

Also, I see that money earned via google adsense is not in a clear black and white format per this article.

Google does not disclose exactly how much you'll earn per ad that is clicked.

The commission you receive per click depends on how much advertisers are paying Google for the particular ad. You will earn a share of that amount. I've heard of earnings anywhere from 2 cents to $15 per click.

So it is logical to believe that keyword phrases like debt free, employment, make money, mp3, sex, etc. will earn you more per click since these are highly competitive keywords that are searched for quite a bit on the web.

Advertisers generally pay more for popular terms because they are searched for more.

Even though Google will not reveal how much you are earning for each ad that is clicked from your site, you can still login to your account at any time and see the total amount of revenue you've generated that day, week, month, year, etc.

But anyway this isn't a witch hunt. But the truth still lies in what I said - new tab that points to page with ads, regardless of true knowledge of total number of users with the addon installed [ignoring the fact he could check his own website stats to gauge user traffic before rollout of "welcome page" tab], minus an option in the GUI to turn off said tab. I say add a clear option in the UI, hopefully it won't clutter NoScript's Options UI and can fit in nicely as I think it might. You could possibly add it to the top of the Advanced tab, underneath Show... though.

You may argue is a there a big enough need to warrant adding the pref to UI? I say make a poll on the very page you direct users to. Let their numbers speak for themselves. As I said we have lots of haters/annoyed users with just the Firefox has Updated tab, and Firefox updates waaaaay less in the same timeframe you do. Yet they are still annoyed. So keep that in mind.

Also 1 more thing:
• Also I see that I can't view both your addon's [or quite a few people's] statistics on AMO. The "View Statistics" link at the very bottom of Advanced Details, could you enable that? I'm a nerd for graphs and download rates. I asked another addon author whose stats were public about this, and he said most likely AMO sets it to private by default without the author realizing it. Unless there's a sound reason to make it private?

Thanks for replying, Giorgio.
And Guardian, didn't mean to make you feel like you did. But seriously, relax. I know what can happen once a topic having anything to do with something controversial is made. Anyone can come in and flame and have at it [especially with guest posting], making it even more uncomfortable for the person you're trying to reach out to speak his mind. I'd rather have none of that [random flame posts] if presented with only receiving much of the former or getting an actual answer. I'm a moderator too that deals with guest posting, so I expect bad & good. And judging from how fresh this wound was and seeing the thread discussing the bulk of it, I had to state my case/intentions for the record. Anyway, in short, chill. Don't have to take it to the heart.

[Giorgio Maone]

@Noah:
The UI checkbox for Show release notes upon version upgrade in the NoScript Options|Notifications tabs has already been added this morning and will be available in next development build.

An answer I missed to give you, all my ads are paid per-click or even per-conversion, none of them is paid per-impression.
Therefore I reasonably get a negligible boost from showing ads to people who don't want to see them in first place, and provided that Easylist's crusade actually cut this figure by a substantial (~80%) amount, I'd be inclined to say most ABP+Easylist users had no objection to noscript.net's ads (as long as they were able to see them).

Regarding the statistics, I've got the same doubts as the one previously expressed by Mandy (they may fuel speculations rather than cooling them down), but I can tell you the active users count is more than 1 million and less than 5 millions.