Grooveshark Asks Users To Subscribe, Or Else, Unskippable Ads
There is nothing wrong with financing a service or website with advertisement. There will always be users who will use ad blockers or other scripts to get rid of those ads, but the majority will understand that these are what pay the bills and keep the site going. The wrong kind of advertisement on a site can have an ill-effect on the site's reputation. The wrong kind in this regard refers both to what the ads try to sell, their placement, or type.
Grooveshark, ever since it has been introduced in 2007, monetized the site with ads and subscriptions. Ads were displayed as banners on the page, and subscriptions for Grooveshark Plus or Grooveshark Anywhere got rid of them, and added new features to the music streaming service at the same time. This includes access to the Grooveshark desktop app, or unlimited Grooveshark access on the mobile app.
Grooveshark Changes
Matthew A. Hansen was one of the first Grooveshark users who reported about a more aggressive monetization strategy on Grooveshark. According to his information, Grooveshark displayed a Keep the music going screen to him which explained that operating the service costs money, and that Grooveshark because of this is asking for support.
Options available here were to pay money for an uninterrupted experience, or select the $0 option to continue the free ride. Matthew did select the free option, which lead to a video engagement ad that was shown to him. This was a 40 second YouTube video that started to play right away. While pausing and skipping is possible, a message is displayed in this case that is explaining that credits are not given if the video is not watched from the beginning to the end.
We have detected that you have tried to skip part of the video. You will not get credit if you skip around the video. Please watch the video from the beginning through the end
It appears that Grooveshark is rolling out a credit-based system for free users of the service. It is not really clear how much credits users get when they watch the video, and for how long they can listen to music on Grooveshark with a credit.
Watching a single video gives credits that are good for listening to four hours of music on the Grooveshark website.
I tried to get the video ad to be displayed on Grooveshark for the better half of an hour and did not succeed. This could mean a number of things, like that it is still being rolled out to all users, that it is only active for registered users, or that you need to listen more than that to see the ad.
I do not think that $2 for a month of music is too much to ask for on the other hand, even with all the free alternatives available on today's Internet. Forcing ads on users on the other hand is not the way to go forward. Many will probably leave Grooveshark for other services instead of paying up for uninterrupted music on the site.
What's your take on this?
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.