Coinbase Swears This All Isn't Like the Dotcom Bubble After Super Bowl Ad SNAFU (vice.com) 81
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The most insufferable part of every Super Bowl Sunday has historically, without fail, been the ads. This year was no exception, with an unrelenting barrage of ads trying to manifest the metaverse, convince viewers they're missing out on crypto, and lure new blood to online and physical casinos. Results were mixed. Coinbase, in one ad named WAGMI ("we're all going to make it"), crafted an advertisement that bounced a QR code around the screen, changing colors each time it hit the edge like an old-school DVD menu. Scanning the QR codewhich immediately forfeits your right to enter heaventakes the user to this page, where Coinbase offers $15 in Bitcoin for signing up as well as a chance to enter a contest to win one of three prizes for $1 million worth of Bitcoin. The linked webpage went down almost immediately thanks to the increased traffic from the ad, and ridicule at the idea of paying millions of dollars to send millions of viewers to a down site poured in from around the web.
To Coinbase, though, the ad was a success. In a blog post congratulating itself on the advertisement and interviewing Coinbase Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch about why the ad was so good, the company revealed it saw "20M+ hits on our landing page in one minute" which "led to us temporarily throttling our systems." Chief executive Brian Armstrong took to Twitter to gloat about the ad: ranked #1 by AdWeek and peaking at #2 in the Apple App Store, just ahead of apps for the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show and the NFL. As it turns out, putting up nothing but a QR code in the middle of a widely-watched sports event and offering free money as well as a chance to win $3 million is a good way to build interest in your app. When Motherboard reached out to Coinbase about the ad, the company directed Motherboard to Rouch's blog post and reiterated its main points.
While taking a victory lap for the apparent success of its ad, Coinbase took the time to explain why this is definitely not at all like the dotcom bubble, which many critics have said is an apt comparison for Sunday's ads. "There have been a lot of comparisons to the dot.com era and speculation that many of the crypto companies advertising in this year's Super Bowl will inevitably fail," said Rouch in Coinbase's blog post. "We don't think about it that way and judging from the early response we've seen, Super Bowl viewers don't either." Rouch insisted that the sheer number of crypto ads in the Super Bowl was "yet another signal that crypto is bursting into the mainstream, and at the center of the cultural zeitgeist." Further reading: This Year's Super Bowl Broadcast May Seem 'Crypto-Happy'. But the NFL Isn't
To Coinbase, though, the ad was a success. In a blog post congratulating itself on the advertisement and interviewing Coinbase Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch about why the ad was so good, the company revealed it saw "20M+ hits on our landing page in one minute" which "led to us temporarily throttling our systems." Chief executive Brian Armstrong took to Twitter to gloat about the ad: ranked #1 by AdWeek and peaking at #2 in the Apple App Store, just ahead of apps for the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show and the NFL. As it turns out, putting up nothing but a QR code in the middle of a widely-watched sports event and offering free money as well as a chance to win $3 million is a good way to build interest in your app. When Motherboard reached out to Coinbase about the ad, the company directed Motherboard to Rouch's blog post and reiterated its main points.
While taking a victory lap for the apparent success of its ad, Coinbase took the time to explain why this is definitely not at all like the dotcom bubble, which many critics have said is an apt comparison for Sunday's ads. "There have been a lot of comparisons to the dot.com era and speculation that many of the crypto companies advertising in this year's Super Bowl will inevitably fail," said Rouch in Coinbase's blog post. "We don't think about it that way and judging from the early response we've seen, Super Bowl viewers don't either." Rouch insisted that the sheer number of crypto ads in the Super Bowl was "yet another signal that crypto is bursting into the mainstream, and at the center of the cultural zeitgeist." Further reading: This Year's Super Bowl Broadcast May Seem 'Crypto-Happy'. But the NFL Isn't
Monthly Taco Subscription (Score:2)
Speaking of bubbles, monthly subscriptions surely must have peaked: https://nypost.com/2022/01/06/... [nypost.com]
Value of bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to see how the ad was a particular success, since Bitcoin is near its low for the past five days.
Re:Value of bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
Too snarky (Score:5, Funny)
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I thought the half-time show was the most insufferable part... but that's just me (boomer here).
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Then, he appeared in one of the commercials....
So despite what the summary says (Score:5, Insightful)
If I was an advertiser and I bought a super bowl ad I would be furious. And I would want to make it a point that if they sell to one of these crypto companies again then I won't be bringing my business. Not out of any misplaced sense of propriety or decency. This is business and such things really don't exist in business. Especially at the level of buying super bowl ads. But because my investment wouldn't go anywhere or be worthwhile.
Also I am absolutely furious with the amount of dodgy corporate whores trying to sell me crypto at this point. It's bad enough that I've got square soft and Ubisoft both basically saying that I'll accept nfts whether I like it or not because I'm stupid, but I've got Jimmy Fallon obviously and awkwardly Hocking the things, Matt Damon making a fool of himself and now this.
It's not just the crypto is all around bad and the pyramid scheme and every sense of the word it's that I have to question how low of an opinion of me do these people have if they think I'm going to fall for that pyramid scheme? It's honestly insulting
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crypto isn't 'bad' all the way around.
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Re: So despite what the summary says (Score:2)
It separates fools from their money.
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I'm not sold on it, and it's actually kind of scary, but it lets people move "money" wherever they want to without governments getting in the way. Given enough traction, it would fundamentally change the finance world.
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You can have a practically unblockable transaction. When credit card processing and paypal refuse to do business, the one remaining option was to mail cash. Now there is a second option.
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and we have a winner.
when you have just a handful of payment processing companies that are susceptible to government pressure or have their own virtue signaling goals, it's nice to have another option for sending money.
similarly take the trucker protest in canada or rittenhouse's defense (since it's slashdot pretend it's for some cause you happen to agree with. Try not to get caught up on the specifics here.) Gofundme and similar blocked or refused to deliver donations (and with gofundme, essentially tried
That's not true (Score:2)
And that's before we talk about how easily traceable crypto is. If your wallet is public so people can pay you it's relatively easy for people to shut you down. What's more, you couldn't even pass your crypto
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hopefully one day several years ago they invent monero to resolve those issues.
i'm not even a huge crypto supporter; just that there are benefits to keeping some method of exchange out of the clutches of government and a handful of megacorps.
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since they could trace it back easily and block it, and do so programmatically
are you in favor of the government having the ability to run fishing expeditions en masse by the way?
i'm really not.
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You don't always need to use exchanges, and even when you do, blocking is a tiny 0.0(not sure how many 0s)01% usage case. They simply haven't been doing it to any significant degree, whereas credit cards and paypal have been doing it on a routine basis. Even snailmailed cash isn't perfectly reliable either.
My point is that cryptocurrency doesn't have to outrun the bear, it just has to outrun everyone else, and so far, it has been doing so without even breathing hard. It's not even that cryptocurrency is awe
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People love super bowl ads. Or at least that's what the prevailing narrative is in the media.
Funny ads are funny, regardless of whether or not they're intended to be shown during the big sportsball game. My latest favorite is the Geico "Robot Tests" commercial. Now every time I see one of those obnoxious CAPTCHAs, I think frustration loading .
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He's hawking them.
https://whatis.techtarget.com/... [techtarget.com]
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And this is what makes you not the target audience.
Exactly the same as with those stunted spam emails trying to get you to send money to Nigeria, the grammatical errors, the over the top nonsense, the stupid mistakes; They're not mistakes.
It's all there to make sure that someone with some intelligence won't fall for it, because those people are trouble.
In other news, People like free money. (Score:2)
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It's not worth it to sell your private info for $15
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With no meaningful privacy laws and Facebook, most of those users will have given away all their private info for years. This is a $15 rebate.
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I bet most of those new accounts will grab their "free" $15 and cash out as fast as they can.
Before the latest crypto bubble, I did a bunch of those stupid "watch a video and earn $1 in shitcoins" on Coinbase. Never bothered to cash 'em out, and when things started getting all frenzied, it turned out those shitcoins were worth about $40 in real money. *Then* I cashed out.
It's still gambling, though. Even if you win the first round with the free comp chips from the casino, there's no guarantee you'll get the same results once you start playing with your money.
More like the best part... (Score:2)
>quote>The most insufferable part of every Super Bowl Sunday has historically, without fail, been the ads.
For starters this is just false, people gush every year about funny or entertaining commercial during the super bowl. Montages of the best ones can be found all over Youtube every single year and the most popular ones you even hear about on the news.
They're also just about the only thing I watch when I go to Super Bowl parties :) . Not a big pro sports guy, I just like junk food, beer, and friends
Re: More like the best part... (Score:2)
People also loved the pets.com ad during the 2000 Super Bowl. It didn't save the company from going bankrupt soon after.
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For starters this is just false, people gush every year about funny or entertaining commercial during the super bowl.
One has to see a funny or entertaining commercial first to gush about it. The few ads I watched this year absolutely sucked. None were interesting in the least. And this was after watching most of last year's crop which was equally bad.
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Ads can only be funny or interesting if you have less life experience than the creator and can be dazzled to forget they're ultimately trying to emotionally maniuplate you to spend your money. Therefore as you age you're going to find them progressively more tedious. It's entirely possible this year's ads were just as brilliant as ten years ago, but you're the one who's changed.
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^^^THIS. 100% truth.
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I didn't watch the super bowl at all this year so I wouldnt know. Regardless though, Super Bowl commercials are thought of as part of the fun for a lot of folks.
obfuscated links are terrible (Score:5, Informative)
Preventing URLs from being human-readable is terrible for security. Even old-fashioned 1-D barcodes have decimal numbers printed below them.
All the advice I've seen has been to "never click on random links," so how is clicking on a random link you can't even read somehow acceptable?
Here's a link to goatse displayed as a QR code. You could print it out. You could make it into stickers and put them over other QR codes. You could put it on a T-shirt. Maybe a few gaping anuses will teach people not to follow random obfuscated links.
Goatse QR codes:
https://postimg.cc/JDXZVv7X [postimg.cc]
https://i.postimg.cc/W3WnrcQ5/... [postimg.cc]
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Indeed. QR-codes are basically a visual malware vector. However displaying the link will do nothing for most people as they cannot read URLs.
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displaying the link will do nothing for most people as they cannot read URLs.
That's the point. People seem to be conditioned to just blindly follow the links hidden in QR codes. Perhaps after seeing a harmless, but visually confronting, image, they will think twice next time. Then again, rickrolling didn't stop people clicking on "normal" URLs, so maybe I'm dreaming.
Or did you mean that most people can't even read URLs in plaintext? Like, they can't tell that www.evilmalwaresite.ru is probably not their real bank? If so, I fear you are probably correct :-(
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Or did you mean that most people can't even read URLs in plaintext? Like, they can't tell that www.evilmalwaresite.ru is probably not their real bank? If so, I fear you are probably correct :-(
That is what I mean. And yes, a sad state of affairs.
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Most people don't think about sources in general. How many times have you been arguing with someone and they defend their position by posting a link to www.realtruthnow.com.cn/truthstream/everything_that_reputable_sources_tell_you_is_a_lie.html?fbclid=AHrj184jao69AJf01jpQ.. or whatnot? They saw something that supported their position, what they expected to see, and didn't think to look any further to assess its legitimacy.
My current bugbear is photos of mines. Whenever anyone wants to argue against any tec
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Most people don't think about sources in general. How many times have you been arguing with someone and they defend their position by posting a link to www.realtruthnow.com.cn/truthstream/everything_that_reputable_sources_tell_you_is_a_lie.html?fbclid=AHrj184jao69AJf01jpQ.. or whatnot? They saw something that supported their position, what they expected to see, and didn't think to look any further to assess its legitimacy.
Very much so. Regular people are looking for statements that support their position. They neither verify those statements nor are they looking for statements contradicting their position. That is excellent for identifying the "tribe" they are in or want to be part of and completely worthless for fact-checking and understanding reality.
It seems like regular people use "opinions", "positions" and "views" basically as clustering mechanism only and not as tools to understand how things work or how to make good
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Unless the owners changed the payload from the QR URL just before airing the ad.
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Preventing URLs from being human-readable is terrible for security.
There's nothing obfuscated about QR codes. 100% of QR code readers display the result to the user and ask for confirmation before taking action.
Hell this is precisely what I did. I saw the QR code in the ad, we were wondering what it was, so I held up my phone, click the camera button, and my phone showed the contents on the screen http://www.coinbase./ [www.coinbase.] and that was enough for me to know I don't need to click on it.
No one is going to fall for your stupid goatse.cx links for the same reason. There's nothing
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I don't know about you, but every QR code scanner I have ever used displays the URL and offers to visit it, literally none of them just go there.
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You need a better QR code reader.
Mine doesn't just blindly follow a link. It decodes the QR code, which may be a link or a number or perhaps a cryptography key. Once decoded, it then gives me the choice of what I want to do with it. Follow the link, for example, which is shown in plain text.
Missing out (Score:2)
I saw a late-night ad the other day about an IRA that supports investing in crypto.
Imagine investing all your retirement money in that...
Completely different! (Score:4, Insightful)
>Rouch insisted that the sheer number of crypto ads in the Super Bowl was "yet another signal that crypto is bursting into the mainstream, and at the center of the cultural zeitgeist."
You mean unlike the dotcom bubble? And the Beanie Babies bubble? And every other bubble where millions got hyped on imaginary value just because everybody else is doing it?
Yeah, totally different this time.
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The dotcom bubble at least *attempted* to create useful businesses. The value of those businesses were inflated, but they tried to do stuff like sell people things like books.
As for beanie babies, after the speculation bubble crashed at least you could play with them. When my kids were small I bought them a few beanie babies, and they were actually perfectly good toys. When the kids outgrew them, the dog really enjoyed them. There's nothing a terrier loves more than something that looks like a small fur
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The dotcom bubble at least *attempted* to create useful businesses.
When you only get your crypto news from Slashdot you miss out on the news of actual useful things being created
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Block chain has many interesting use-cases, but as with every other technological fad I've seen in decades of following this stuff, the number of people who want to use it far exceeds the number that understand what it's good for.
As for cryptocurrency, I understand why people are enthusiastic; they love money but hate the government. However currency that's *volatile* is crap as currency.
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Do you mind sharing what those useful things are? If one likes collecting digital claims to virtual goods, good on them or whatever. But I get my news from a variety of sources and I've yet to see anything that isn't either a scam, hypothetical promises, or pure financial speculation.
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If you sign up with Coinbase, they occasionally offer a freebie deal where you learn about a new crypto and earn $3. The most recent one that came up is a coin called Render. You earn Render tokens by renting out your unused gpu which artists and video producers can purchase to complete rendering tasks. Seems a better use of resources than simple mining.
Here are a few others that have caught my attention recently as having some practical use:
District0x - decentralized marketplaces
BAT - replace ads that p
insufferable (Score:2)
>"The most insufferable part of every Super Bowl Sunday has historically, without fail, been the ads."
And I thought it has been the endless virtue signaling- both in the ads and the non-ads.
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Ads? (Score:2)
Who watches Superbowl ads? Time-travelers from 2002? The elderly?
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Tell that to Amelia Earhart's bones.
Egotism again (Score:1)
Did they hire Donald Trump's PR firm for that?
"The coup attempt wasn't really a coup attempt, we were just testing the security of the Capitol. I'd like to thank all my hard-working followers on this great test, which was a
Awesome work, professional editor person (Score:4, Funny)
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Maybe someone on the editorial team is speaking from experience :-D
Or maybe it should have [citation needed] after it.
Either way, a well played piece of text hacking that escaped the proof reader
Not Different (Score:2)
"Not like the dot.com era at all", yet they produce an ad that is the modern equivalent of 'punch the monkey'.
But crypto is mainstream in that it's now a household word. Bubbles are also mainstream, otherwise you wouldn't have heard of them.
Corner (Score:1)
I'm trying (Score:2)
I'm trying to care but it's just not happening.
I beg to differ (Score:2)
A lot of us nerd beg to differ : the LEAST insufferable part of super bowl has always been the ads.
What is this 'soup bowl'... (Score:2)
dot-com (Score:2)
We don't think about it that way and judging from the early response we've seen, Super Bowl viewers don't either."
The exact same thing was true during the dot-com bubble, you know?
Great argument there (Score:2)
"Why is Coinbase not like the dotcom bubble?"
"We don't think it is, and a lot of other people don't think it is."
"That's...not a reason why."
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So, just like a bubble?
Interesting (Score:2)
"We don't think" is probably the most accurate part.
The most insufferable thing (Score:1)
No, the most insufferable part of the Super Bowl is that so much other media anomalously covers that media. I don't see unrelated news and entertainment bother to cover much else in the NFL, not even the playoffs, but suddenly the Super Bowl is special and deserving, even if every other game leading up to it wasn't.
It was a TV show on last weekend, and the media is still hyping it. And yet, simultaneously, nob
Slashdotted (Score:2)
It used to be that only slashdot, could cause a web site to be "slashdotted". It apparently took a Super Bowl ad to compete!
Superbowl halftime app? (Score:3)