Simon Willison’s Weblog

Three new features for reddit gold. Reddit’s experiments with a subscriber program are interesting to watch. 9,000 people signed up as subscribers without there being any benefit at all, and they’re now being rewarded with the ability to opt out of ads and access to computationally expensive features (like different ways of sorting their own user page) that wouldn’t scale for the entire user base.

# 20th July 2010, 5:54 pm / ads, reddit, scaling, subscriptions, recovered

Vintage Ad Browser. Fantastic. 100,000+ vintage advertisements scanned and organised by date and topic, going all the way back to the 1840s and covering every decade in between. An absolute gold mine.

# 6th January 2010, 9:04 am / design, advertising, ads, archive, history

Google Analytics goes async. This is excellent news—the latest version of the Google Analytics JavaScript is designed to allow for asynchronous loading, so it won’t hold up the rendering of your page. Analytics and banner ads are the two worst offenders when it comes to slowing down page loads. Now if only a banner ad vendor would follow suit...

# 2nd December 2009, 6:30 pm / google, google-analytics, analytics, ads, performance, steve-souders, async, javascript

How to avoid ads in gmail. “After extensive testing I’ve discovered you need 1 catastrophic event or tragedy for every 167 words in the rest of the email.”

# 31st July 2009, 1:40 am / gmail, ads

How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs. My variant on this idea is to serve ads only on content that’s at least 6 months old. I’ve made $473.98 since January.

# 1st June 2007, 9:10 pm / ads, matt-haughey