I've been on the fence about this for a while, and after reading what GroundUp wrote, I can't agree with them more. So I think it's time for me to dump Google Ads from my sites, as well. I send Big G three million ad impressions a month, and in return I get $150 and a bunch of visual dreck that makes the site look bad. $200, if I'm lucky. And this is all U.S. traffic on an award-winning news site. I only need to sell one more local ad to more than make up for the loss, and I get the extra benefit of having only quality, relevant advertising on my site.
So to quote GroundUp: "Obviously the behemoth in Mountain View won’t miss [us], but we take some pride in saying the feeling’s mutual."
Off topic: this is the first time I've heard of GroundUp, and I really like the "Dear Editor" format of the comment page on this site.
I'm used to seeing mainstream newspaper websites with downright toxic commenting environments, so seeing "Dear Editor" followed by a thought-out response is very refreshing. Maybe they have a "better" readership/screening process/whatever, but I think this higher quality commenting behavior is in part due to how GroundUp has simply tweaked the wording of the comment box interface - by framing the comment with "Dear Editor".
When I started with Google ads, Google was classier than other ad networks. Other ad networks were stuffed with free ringtones, sketchy supplements and other scams.
Then at some point Google gave me the option to opt out of various objectionable topics and soon Google ads got as bad as the others. Maybe Google bought the bad ad networks, or partnered with them or something.
Quite a bit of subtext is largely unexamined. AT&T and Verizon, two of the biggest advertisers, have pulled out from YouTube. AT&T is the biggest pay TV provider in the US now (DirecTV) and Verizon wishes you would watch Go90 so they could sell ads against it. Both of them benefit if ad spend goes elsewhere than YouTube.
I worried when Google bought DoubleClick many years back if Google would become as bad as DoubleClick. I don't think we can point fingers at any one thing precisely, but that did seem like an omen at the time.
I think the problem with ads on the internet is that it will always be a race to the bottom. Ads on TV and in newspapers/magazines have scarcities in play to somewhat help manage them. Ad space on the internet has never been scarce.
The ad companies (Google and Facebook especially) see themselves as somehow unbiased market platforms, and I think we are coming to point where the lack of scarcities leaves "neutral" platforms vulnerable to very cheap "attacks". I worry that ad platforms need to exert a lot more editorial control in the face of that and/or start building a lot more artificial scarcity into their platforms, and I don't think any of them are appropriately incentivized to do that.
I also worry that Google and Facebook's ad spaces are content spaces: search ads at the top of search results, and sponsored "posts" that have like/share/comment abilities. I think that also requires a custodianship and a moral obligation to editorially control those spaces that neither Google nor Facebook have thus far been inclined to take enough responsibility for. Facebook especially, when liked/shared ads graduate to "real" viral content, entirely blurring the lines between ads and content and giving direct power to cheap micro-targeting attacks without having some editorial immune system to help avoid the worst memetic viruses. (Facebook claims to want to do better, but their fiduciary responsibility incentivizes them not to treat ads as user hostile infection points.)
Ad networks regularly serve various forms of malware and spyware, as well as tracking beacons that put my data at risk of being stolen or misused. And once it's in a database somewhere, it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen and someone attempts to hijack accounts or steal an identity.
It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. When you take away the option to protect myself, you accept responsibility for attacks. After all, if it's morally/legally wrong to alter the presentation of the content they serve, then they also morally/legally responsible for incidents when they serve it improperly and cause losses/damages. Quite obviously it's not financially viable for them to pay for their negligence, and so it's also not financially viable for me to trust that a site won't host some sort of attack vector.
The pennies of advertising revenue earned from my modest browsing over the course of a year doesn't pay nearly enough to compensate for the time I lose through dealing with malicious ads. Unless online advertising cleans itself up, adblockers will be the best option. And sites that don't respect that aren't sites I'm interested in.
For smaller websites (also referred to the democratization of the internet), I am sure many people may (or have) feel (felt) guilty for using an ad-blocker.
Then you see all those shitty ads for:
- finding a russian bride
- getting rich through some millionaires secret
- anti-aging remedies
- adware
and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.
People keep saying that "journalism is dying", but this industry and its ad-model isn't very "old" in historical terms. For every Business Insider that dies, the world will carry on. For quality journalism (an oxymoron of sorts) and news that matters to people and their circumstances, I assume people will keep forking out money (like they do for The Economist).
If someone smarter than myself can elaborate, how is Googles business-model for ads on 3rd-party websites sustainable for the long-term?
My attitude toward ad blockers was always "meh". I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish. Using an ad blocker is just modifying the rendering algorithm, much the same way as I could use a French to Russian translator, something that increases font sizes, or throwing on a custom stylesheet. I can write my own web browser, if I wish.
Some percentage of users will use ad blockers, and businesses should account for that. If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented. One thing I've been hoping for is inventing some form of advertising that was actually fun for the user -- fun enough that they would not want to block them.
Or invent a system by which 10% of the ad revenue gets cut out to the end user. That will incentivize people to unblock ads.
I remembered an old maxim. Apparently, a successful copywriter was asked "How do you write a good ad?" and his answer was "Its very easy. Get the Yellow pages for this year, last year and the year before. See which ads repeat. They are repeating because they are working. Now just copy those ads for your purpose"
The point is, those shitty ads keep repeating on those websites because their ROI is positive. Google wants to help these people by providing them every imaginable and conceivable tool so they can do it better. This also answers your last question about how their business model is sustainable for the long term. It is actually really sustainable because you think Google is a search engine, and I think Google morphed long ago into an internet scale ad-ROI measurement engine which keeps improving (by violently invading privacy of course) both the measurement tools and the actual ROI itself for those who keep pouring money into these ads.
I used to feel there was something bad about using ad-blockers, then Google started paying AdBlock to allow some types of Google ads through. I learned this while working for Google in DoubleClick circa 2014. I no longer work for Google. PSA -- just so you know.
I'm sort of confused. That list of yours is a bunch of stuff that (at least not generally) Google doesn't advertise. So where does the "only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts" bit come from? Seems like you're only angry at the peddlers. What did Google do?
Nowadays, when a family member is asking which "antivirus should I pick?", my answer goes along the lines of "just install uBlock Origin, activate this and that filter and allow it in incognito mode. You can do it on your own, it's super easy and super effective". Even better, this also "fix" most of the "slow computer" complaints.
With the notable exception of AdBlock Plus (which has its own problems) the big ad block plugins tend to be philosophically opposed to all ads of any type, quality or quantity. This is a bummer for sites like ours where the ads are sold directly to advertisers (no network) and are relevant to the audience and subject matter.
> and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but check out https://hotlinkx.com if you want. What you mentioned are a few of the other things it tries to address by letting publishers manually choose what they want to advertise.
The list is compatible with uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus. If you know of any other bad clickbait ad networks, please let me know! As the article describes, I now see clickbait ads from Google that are almost as bad, but I'm not quite ready to block all Google ads in what was supposed to be a minimal blocklist.
I think this speaks for 1000s and 1000s of small(er) website publishers. All squeezed by Google.
For example, we run a website having millions of page views a month. And similarly frustrated.
If we can divide the slot between 10 advertisers directly, we might make much more. Perhaps even double than what Adsense pays. The only reason, why we don't attempt that is time and effort getting directed in an unwanted direction.
And many small businesses are always struggling for bandwidth to do the core job (and projects that enthuse them). And Google is getting full advantage of this situation.[1]
Sometime back, I even wrote to them on falling CPCs (eCPMs) but of course, Google has a culture of not replying.
Its amazing to see, Internet living with a broken Ad model, for so long. I can't wait for a browser like Brave to take off. Where we can collect an ultra small amount from users for pageview, and still make more than Adsense.
[1] I suspect, this squeeze is happening more recently, because Google itself is feeling the pinch from Facebook. As its stealing a lot of its Ad revenue.
Unfortunately if your money comes from advertising your core job is advertising. So you should focus on your core business. I don't blame you for not liking this - and I don't like it either. The problem is that I like so many others probably wouldn't pay for your content/service if I had to.
I was always saying that the Google motto is not "do no evil", but "do evil so thin that nobody can notice or can speak up and be taken seriously."
But that tiniest evil is multiplied by billions, with the power of automation. It is really an epoch-making company in that it gives a new light to the definition of the word.
An ordinary person (myself included) can't sense it. Their evil only appears in statistics.
If I ordered the parts individually and read the repair manual, I could replace the starter in my car for much less money than taking it to the mechanic. The only reason why I don't attempt that is time and effort getting directed in an unwanted direction.
I started, ran an sold an ad based business in 2008. To say that most of the activity in the ad space was dubious back then is a complete understatement.
Most of our traffic to the adverts was generated, purely to syphon off money from the advertisers and we established this by fingerprinting the traffic with JS tools at the client side. This was what let me to the conclusion that the business is dysfunctional, the customers at best are getting wildly ripped off, their privacy effectively sold off and they open themselves up to huge amounts of malware too.
Advertising is a horrible business model. But until a new way is found, people/businesses don't have any other choice of marketing their activities.
I totally stand by the publication. Any publication that really cares about it's readers will try to find another way.
(Edit: I am viewing this page on a Brave Browser, check it out, it has ad blocking and publisher micropayments built in https://brave.com)
I always imagined that some website/mobile app/service would appear that would let you buy subscriptions for access to multiple publishers at once. I think people have a hard time spending $5 here a month $10 there a month, but would spend maybe $49 for a range of access to sites. I don't know why something like that hasn't taken off yet. You could pick the sites you want access to or they could do a pay out based on where you went and what you read.
So far, for me, the tip jar has been more successful than ads or Patreon (though I am new to Patreon, so, time will tell). I would be happy to get rid of ads altogether (with the exception of one site, for REASONS) if I thought that would drive up tips. But I have experimented a bit and it didn't seem to drive up tips.
Then, whenever I read these discussions, there is a great deal of vitriol about the evil of ads, yet, most people don't actually want to pay for content. They just want it free. When you suggest this is a broken model and content producers also deserve compensation, the answer is typically "not my problem," basically.
As a content producer, I find it enormously frustrating to read some of the awful things that get said. It reminds me of the line in All in the Family where Archie says men are supposed to have experience before marriage and women are not and his daughter asks "Who are they supposed to get their experience with?"
My snarky son's answer: Elderly widows should be deflowering young men. It fits all the parameters of the expectations while horrifying most people.
An awful lot of people are only thinking about "I don't want ads" and that's it. They basically want it for free, then don't think about what that means for the big picture.
I started subscribing and paying for Blendle about a month ago. Their service shows me article summaries from otherwise expensive publications like The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Economist, etc. I can view a full article from $0.10 to about $0.50 without advertisements.
I spend a little over a dollar a week and I get to occasionally read articles from sources that are expensive to buy a full subscription for.
I wonder if publishers find Blendle's usage statistics to be useful. They certainly track users'navigation across their own web properties, but knowing which articles people are willing to pay for must be a good signal.
I'd be interested in something that was the web site equivalent of Spotify, but not if it was HTML HBO.
I think the reason the online music subscriptions have done so well is that their catalogs span multiple publishers, and customers really don't want to subscribe to multiple services. While there's minor differences, you pretty much can get access to any music you can think of.
Otherwise you just end up with some crummy bundling service where you pay a premium for a few things you are interested in, and waste money on the rest of the junk.
The reason why it has not taken off is because success depends strongly from network effect. Starting small provides no value for subscribers.
What we need is subscription payment service network __protocol__. It should be protocol because we don't want to give monopoly for single organization.
You pay something lke $5 -$60 per month for one company of your choosing. Whenever you visit a web page and pay, consume content or tip, your browser leaves an anonymous authenticated tokens/coins/whatever behind. Services can turn these tokens into money.
Piano Media tried this in central Europe and folded.
Reason as I understand it: downward spiral. Publishers of worthy content learn to make people pay for content, and then go off-platform once they have large enough audience to keep the whole profit.
Weaker publications stay in a bundle, but at that point not many people want to pay.
Is this a future of Spotify model as well? Taylor Swift or Adele are now powerful enough to try to break away.
There's no reason to believe that this would get rid of ads in the long run. Once the big publishers have established such a payment model, what keeps them from adding ads on top of it? You pay $5 for printed newspapers and magazines, do they come ad-free?
I'd love to have something like that. We already have Spotify (et al) for music. PressReader for newspapers. If the music industry can be dragged kicking and screaming into the bulk buying model, why can't online publishers?
I probably wouldn't mind paying for the online newspaper an article at a time, like a nickel. For some reason, the idea of a subscription just irks me - it makes me feel guilty when I don't read the paper, because hey I paid for it.
texture.com looks quite promising, they cover well known magazines (Time/New Yorker/Forbes etc.) I don't know anything else, I just heard them advertised on a podcast - US/Canada only for some reason so I can't check it out.
The ad driven models are slowly killing publishing. They're right in what they're saying - their competition is clickbait that just wants attention. A view is a view, and an ad will pay out the same regardless of the quality of the content on the page. I really hope we find a way to distribute payment for quality content in a better way. It's something that I've been working on personally because I like publishing content, and I hate having to choose between marring my content with ads, or losing money if I hit the front page of reddit.
I recently tried putting Google ads on one of my websites. Over the course of 10,000 page views Google shows there were only 7 click throughs.
It does not even make sense because it means there was basically zero mis-clicks. I don't know how they count a click-through but it seems to be more than just someone clicking on the ad.
Also I'm pretty tired of hearing how Google are the good guys and 'do no evil'. It's obvious through their latest YouTube scandals and AdSense they are literally stealing billions of dollars from individuals around the world.
My experience with google ads was not great. I once ran google ads for my mom's online shop. Before, there was a constant stream of visitors and revenue. With google ads, the visitor rate went up crazy - the revenue, not at all! Despite the fact that the ad was very specific for what you could buy for how much. Once the google ad credits were all used up, the visitors rate dropped to almost zero. As if google was punishing us for not running ads anymore.
I too deal with Google as a "publisher", and some of my experiences are similar to theirs. For example the odd way that they complain about certain forms of content, apparently prompted by an algorithm and unchecked by a human.
It seems to me that Google is a kind of corporate "Rain Man" - they have amazing abilities, and yet there are also these astonishing failures to deal with problems which could easily be resolved by a normal corporation.
I've been saying that the ad model is broken for a while, and prescribing a real fix for it: a new form of native advertising that actually benefits the user. My company, PLEENQ[1], makes it so users can hover over an image and click on the individual products within it to go where they can buy the product. Here's a demo video: https://youtu.be/V_oTtDUV0yI
My solution is to basically build features around the content of sites that enhance the areas of the site that already attract the users. More importantly, it simplifies the revenue model that the article talks about -- people click on your links and make purchases, and you get a share of every single purchase (CPA). The important thing is that it's compatible with any other revenue models a site might use. If, like GroundUp, they take donations, then it's just an extra revenue source on top of that.
I looked on GroundUp.org for building an example video of how that would work so I could show the community, but it doesn't really fit the model of PLEENQ. Regardless, there are a vast number of niches that this new form of native advertising would drastically improve the revenue for. Imagine an auto blog showing a picture of an engine, and you being able to hover over any part within the picture and purchase it from Auto Zone.
Another thing is that it can be used to split between revenue generating links, and informational links. Perhaps you have a news site, and a lot of your articles have pictures of politicians that your users might not be familiar with -- how about hovering over that person and being able to click on them to go to their Wikipedia page? I think that would greatly benefit a user browsing the site, and wouldn't cheapen in any way the experience of the site itself (in fact would greatly improve it).
Adsense has became a less and less attractive option. Ad quality is poor, revenue per click lower and lower, policies are enforced weirdly and keep changing, force you to display annoying cookie modals, etc.
I had a bit silly idea about financing of web services.
Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB.
Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP header. Or you could add artificial latency to every request.
Then you sell those useless bytes or milliseconds. Your bytes could really be unicode glyphs. Example: a dollar for every byte per month. When a user leases a specific byte you can send it to him by an e-mail for increased silliness factor. He leased it, so it will not be sent to anyone else as long as he pays.
That way you can specify a ceiling of profits. 500kB at one dollar per kB can bring you at most $500k per month. It seems fair, a bit like Patreon targets.
I thought about doing a service this way. And even a platform - providing web server configs and plug-ins that would do all this selling of bytes process, also payment processor for bytes that would also run on the idea.
You really need different monetization for different kinds of sites.
1) Low quality, high volume, low overhead: google ads.
2) High quality/high value, low volume, niche: subscription/services
3) Medium quality, low volume, niche: donation
The only form of advertising I'd ever want on my site, unless it is a very low quality, is direct sold by my own staff (i.e. me). I'd probably optimize for effort and just do a single "sponsor" for each month, or maybe ongoing. The low-touch way is probably to pick a relevant CPA program (say, Audible) and pitch that to your own audience.
I noticed how civil all the comments are. I wonder if automatically prepending all comments with "Dear Editor" makes people think twice before writing the more common and nasty form of comments usual found in the comment sections of news pages?
I added this article to /. (Slashdot) and it was marked as spam, sending it's rating black and instantly damaging it's chance of being seen, yet here it has proper and full engagement?!? How did someone at /. consider this spam? Hopefully someone here can shed some light.
It's such a weird time to be alive: with all the controversy around advertising nowadays we're kind of seeing Google's previously invulnerable tendrils around the Internet slowly being peeled off. That being their major source of income, they must be worried. I am too, but for another reason -- I don't want a company like Facebook taking over and establishing a monopoly (say what you will about Google, companies like Facebook are even less ethical).
[+] [-] reaperducer|9 years ago|reply
So to quote GroundUp: "Obviously the behemoth in Mountain View won’t miss [us], but we take some pride in saying the feeling’s mutual."
[+] [-] alexchantavy|9 years ago|reply
I'm used to seeing mainstream newspaper websites with downright toxic commenting environments, so seeing "Dear Editor" followed by a thought-out response is very refreshing. Maybe they have a "better" readership/screening process/whatever, but I think this higher quality commenting behavior is in part due to how GroundUp has simply tweaked the wording of the comment box interface - by framing the comment with "Dear Editor".
[+] [-] PaulHoule|9 years ago|reply
Then at some point Google gave me the option to opt out of various objectionable topics and soon Google ads got as bad as the others. Maybe Google bought the bad ad networks, or partnered with them or something.
Quite a bit of subtext is largely unexamined. AT&T and Verizon, two of the biggest advertisers, have pulled out from YouTube. AT&T is the biggest pay TV provider in the US now (DirecTV) and Verizon wishes you would watch Go90 so they could sell ads against it. Both of them benefit if ad spend goes elsewhere than YouTube.
[+] [-] WorldMaker|9 years ago|reply
I think the problem with ads on the internet is that it will always be a race to the bottom. Ads on TV and in newspapers/magazines have scarcities in play to somewhat help manage them. Ad space on the internet has never been scarce.
The ad companies (Google and Facebook especially) see themselves as somehow unbiased market platforms, and I think we are coming to point where the lack of scarcities leaves "neutral" platforms vulnerable to very cheap "attacks". I worry that ad platforms need to exert a lot more editorial control in the face of that and/or start building a lot more artificial scarcity into their platforms, and I don't think any of them are appropriately incentivized to do that.
I also worry that Google and Facebook's ad spaces are content spaces: search ads at the top of search results, and sponsored "posts" that have like/share/comment abilities. I think that also requires a custodianship and a moral obligation to editorially control those spaces that neither Google nor Facebook have thus far been inclined to take enough responsibility for. Facebook especially, when liked/shared ads graduate to "real" viral content, entirely blurring the lines between ads and content and giving direct power to cheap micro-targeting attacks without having some editorial immune system to help avoid the worst memetic viruses. (Facebook claims to want to do better, but their fiduciary responsibility incentivizes them not to treat ads as user hostile infection points.)
[+] [-] r00fus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justabystander|9 years ago|reply
It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. When you take away the option to protect myself, you accept responsibility for attacks. After all, if it's morally/legally wrong to alter the presentation of the content they serve, then they also morally/legally responsible for incidents when they serve it improperly and cause losses/damages. Quite obviously it's not financially viable for them to pay for their negligence, and so it's also not financially viable for me to trust that a site won't host some sort of attack vector.
The pennies of advertising revenue earned from my modest browsing over the course of a year doesn't pay nearly enough to compensate for the time I lose through dealing with malicious ads. Unless online advertising cleans itself up, adblockers will be the best option. And sites that don't respect that aren't sites I'm interested in.
[+] [-] phantom_oracle|9 years ago|reply
Then you see all those shitty ads for:
- finding a russian bride
- getting rich through some millionaires secret
- anti-aging remedies
- adware
and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.
People keep saying that "journalism is dying", but this industry and its ad-model isn't very "old" in historical terms. For every Business Insider that dies, the world will carry on. For quality journalism (an oxymoron of sorts) and news that matters to people and their circumstances, I assume people will keep forking out money (like they do for The Economist).
If someone smarter than myself can elaborate, how is Googles business-model for ads on 3rd-party websites sustainable for the long-term?
[+] [-] dheera|9 years ago|reply
Some percentage of users will use ad blockers, and businesses should account for that. If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented. One thing I've been hoping for is inventing some form of advertising that was actually fun for the user -- fun enough that they would not want to block them.
Or invent a system by which 10% of the ad revenue gets cut out to the end user. That will incentivize people to unblock ads.
[+] [-] thr0waway1239|9 years ago|reply
I remembered an old maxim. Apparently, a successful copywriter was asked "How do you write a good ad?" and his answer was "Its very easy. Get the Yellow pages for this year, last year and the year before. See which ads repeat. They are repeating because they are working. Now just copy those ads for your purpose"
The point is, those shitty ads keep repeating on those websites because their ROI is positive. Google wants to help these people by providing them every imaginable and conceivable tool so they can do it better. This also answers your last question about how their business model is sustainable for the long term. It is actually really sustainable because you think Google is a search engine, and I think Google morphed long ago into an internet scale ad-ROI measurement engine which keeps improving (by violently invading privacy of course) both the measurement tools and the actual ROI itself for those who keep pouring money into these ads.
[+] [-] ysub|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fiahil|9 years ago|reply
Nowadays, when a family member is asking which "antivirus should I pick?", my answer goes along the lines of "just install uBlock Origin, activate this and that filter and allow it in incognito mode. You can do it on your own, it's super easy and super effective". Even better, this also "fix" most of the "slow computer" complaints.
[+] [-] ams6110|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfilargi|9 years ago|reply
> - finding a russian bride
> - getting rich through some millionaires secret
> - anti-aging remedies
> - adware
> and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but check out https://hotlinkx.com if you want. What you mentioned are a few of the other things it tries to address by letting publishers manually choose what they want to advertise.
[+] [-] cpeterso|9 years ago|reply
<plug>
So I created a minimal blocklist for the worst clickbait (mostly Outbrain and Taboola): https://github.com/cpeterso/clickbait-blocklist/
The list is compatible with uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus. If you know of any other bad clickbait ad networks, please let me know! As the article describes, I now see clickbait ads from Google that are almost as bad, but I'm not quite ready to block all Google ads in what was supposed to be a minimal blocklist.
</plug>
[+] [-] aws_ls|9 years ago|reply
For example, we run a website having millions of page views a month. And similarly frustrated.
If we can divide the slot between 10 advertisers directly, we might make much more. Perhaps even double than what Adsense pays. The only reason, why we don't attempt that is time and effort getting directed in an unwanted direction.
And many small businesses are always struggling for bandwidth to do the core job (and projects that enthuse them). And Google is getting full advantage of this situation.[1]
Sometime back, I even wrote to them on falling CPCs (eCPMs) but of course, Google has a culture of not replying.
Its amazing to see, Internet living with a broken Ad model, for so long. I can't wait for a browser like Brave to take off. Where we can collect an ultra small amount from users for pageview, and still make more than Adsense.
[1] I suspect, this squeeze is happening more recently, because Google itself is feeling the pinch from Facebook. As its stealing a lot of its Ad revenue.
[+] [-] JupiterMoon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euske|9 years ago|reply
But that tiniest evil is multiplied by billions, with the power of automation. It is really an epoch-making company in that it gives a new light to the definition of the word.
An ordinary person (myself included) can't sense it. Their evil only appears in statistics.
[+] [-] paul_milovanov|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jes5199|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harwoodleon|9 years ago|reply
Most of our traffic to the adverts was generated, purely to syphon off money from the advertisers and we established this by fingerprinting the traffic with JS tools at the client side. This was what let me to the conclusion that the business is dysfunctional, the customers at best are getting wildly ripped off, their privacy effectively sold off and they open themselves up to huge amounts of malware too.
Advertising is a horrible business model. But until a new way is found, people/businesses don't have any other choice of marketing their activities.
I totally stand by the publication. Any publication that really cares about it's readers will try to find another way.
(Edit: I am viewing this page on a Brave Browser, check it out, it has ad blocking and publisher micropayments built in https://brave.com)
[+] [-] mevile|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mz|9 years ago|reply
So far, for me, the tip jar has been more successful than ads or Patreon (though I am new to Patreon, so, time will tell). I would be happy to get rid of ads altogether (with the exception of one site, for REASONS) if I thought that would drive up tips. But I have experimented a bit and it didn't seem to drive up tips.
Then, whenever I read these discussions, there is a great deal of vitriol about the evil of ads, yet, most people don't actually want to pay for content. They just want it free. When you suggest this is a broken model and content producers also deserve compensation, the answer is typically "not my problem," basically.
As a content producer, I find it enormously frustrating to read some of the awful things that get said. It reminds me of the line in All in the Family where Archie says men are supposed to have experience before marriage and women are not and his daughter asks "Who are they supposed to get their experience with?"
My snarky son's answer: Elderly widows should be deflowering young men. It fits all the parameters of the expectations while horrifying most people.
An awful lot of people are only thinking about "I don't want ads" and that's it. They basically want it for free, then don't think about what that means for the big picture.
/rambling vent
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|9 years ago|reply
I spend a little over a dollar a week and I get to occasionally read articles from sources that are expensive to buy a full subscription for.
I wonder if publishers find Blendle's usage statistics to be useful. They certainly track users'navigation across their own web properties, but knowing which articles people are willing to pay for must be a good signal.
[+] [-] dcw303|9 years ago|reply
I think the reason the online music subscriptions have done so well is that their catalogs span multiple publishers, and customers really don't want to subscribe to multiple services. While there's minor differences, you pretty much can get access to any music you can think of.
Otherwise you just end up with some crummy bundling service where you pay a premium for a few things you are interested in, and waste money on the rest of the junk.
[+] [-] specializeded|9 years ago|reply
I've been using them since they launched in the US and couldn't be happier, they even offer refunds for clickbait!
[+] [-] nabla9|9 years ago|reply
What we need is subscription payment service network __protocol__. It should be protocol because we don't want to give monopoly for single organization.
You pay something lke $5 -$60 per month for one company of your choosing. Whenever you visit a web page and pay, consume content or tip, your browser leaves an anonymous authenticated tokens/coins/whatever behind. Services can turn these tokens into money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr
[+] [-] tomaskafka|9 years ago|reply
Reason as I understand it: downward spiral. Publishers of worthy content learn to make people pay for content, and then go off-platform once they have large enough audience to keep the whole profit.
Weaker publications stay in a bundle, but at that point not many people want to pay.
Is this a future of Spotify model as well? Taylor Swift or Adele are now powerful enough to try to break away.
(use Google translate) https://www.pianomedia.sk/122/system-piano-na-slovensku-spln...
[+] [-] zuzun|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techsupporter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iLoch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BillyParadise|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xanderstrike|9 years ago|reply
If you think about it, $5 is probably more than they could ever hope to make serving ads to a single occasional user.
[+] [-] Untit1ed|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjcm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rampage101|9 years ago|reply
It does not even make sense because it means there was basically zero mis-clicks. I don't know how they count a click-through but it seems to be more than just someone clicking on the ad.
Also I'm pretty tired of hearing how Google are the good guys and 'do no evil'. It's obvious through their latest YouTube scandals and AdSense they are literally stealing billions of dollars from individuals around the world.
[+] [-] Jean-Philipe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Safety1stClyde|9 years ago|reply
It seems to me that Google is a kind of corporate "Rain Man" - they have amazing abilities, and yet there are also these astonishing failures to deal with problems which could easily be resolved by a normal corporation.
[+] [-] bazillion|9 years ago|reply
My solution is to basically build features around the content of sites that enhance the areas of the site that already attract the users. More importantly, it simplifies the revenue model that the article talks about -- people click on your links and make purchases, and you get a share of every single purchase (CPA). The important thing is that it's compatible with any other revenue models a site might use. If, like GroundUp, they take donations, then it's just an extra revenue source on top of that.
I looked on GroundUp.org for building an example video of how that would work so I could show the community, but it doesn't really fit the model of PLEENQ. Regardless, there are a vast number of niches that this new form of native advertising would drastically improve the revenue for. Imagine an auto blog showing a picture of an engine, and you being able to hover over any part within the picture and purchase it from Auto Zone.
Another thing is that it can be used to split between revenue generating links, and informational links. Perhaps you have a news site, and a lot of your articles have pictures of politicians that your users might not be familiar with -- how about hovering over that person and being able to click on them to go to their Wikipedia page? I think that would greatly benefit a user browsing the site, and wouldn't cheapen in any way the experience of the site itself (in fact would greatly improve it).
[1] http://pleenq.com
[+] [-] hartator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawski|9 years ago|reply
Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB.
Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP header. Or you could add artificial latency to every request.
Then you sell those useless bytes or milliseconds. Your bytes could really be unicode glyphs. Example: a dollar for every byte per month. When a user leases a specific byte you can send it to him by an e-mail for increased silliness factor. He leased it, so it will not be sent to anyone else as long as he pays.
That way you can specify a ceiling of profits. 500kB at one dollar per kB can bring you at most $500k per month. It seems fair, a bit like Patreon targets.
I thought about doing a service this way. And even a platform - providing web server configs and plug-ins that would do all this selling of bytes process, also payment processor for bytes that would also run on the idea.
[+] [-] rdl|9 years ago|reply
1) Low quality, high volume, low overhead: google ads.
2) High quality/high value, low volume, niche: subscription/services
3) Medium quality, low volume, niche: donation
The only form of advertising I'd ever want on my site, unless it is a very low quality, is direct sold by my own staff (i.e. me). I'd probably optimize for effort and just do a single "sponsor" for each month, or maybe ongoing. The low-touch way is probably to pick a relevant CPA program (say, Audible) and pitch that to your own audience.
[+] [-] wonderway|9 years ago|reply
When you first go to the site, a Credit Karma ad or Rite Aid ad popup appears (promoted by Kixer).
Close that and you see a site just overwhelmed by ads, some local. Then they have the "Sponsored Links" by Content.ad saying:
- "Cheaper and Stronger than Adderral"
- "Don't watch this video around you wife <insert photo of model>"
- "Fruits that fight diabetes"
- "Biblical solutions to weight loss"
The local owners of the newspaper, sold their cable company for $350 million which they had owned for 45 years (Cablevision->Suddenlink).
If an exceptionally wealthy local newspaper owner can't offer content in a reasonable way without egregious deceptive links, who can?
This type of behavior should be heavily criticized, especially by those who can afford to avoid it. Instead, it's considered business as usual.
[+] [-] danieka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoisyboy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beezischillin|9 years ago|reply