9 ms·

The correct answer is to never use programmatic ads. Ever. If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal.

The correct answer is to never use programmatic ads. Ever. If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. Ads are supposed to be useful to your audience, instead of being annoying. People buy fashion magazines - filled with 600 pages of ads- and Sunday newspapers BECAUSE of the ads. They should want to visit your website as well because of your ads. The worst thing you can do for your site is to place out-of-context ads in the middle of your site. Can you imaging if Vogue.com decided to place Flash SSD ads on their site? This is how you destroy an audience, and as a publisher, your number one concern should be to grow your audience. Once you curate a set of ads for your site, you'll find that click-through rates and conversion are far higher than random programmatic ads. You should know your audience, and the kind of ads that would appeal to them. Mark ads as content in your CMS. This avoids ad-blockers. Curating ads is how advertising has always worked, and will continue to work, after all these programmatic garbage goes away.

jay_kyburz 11y ago
This was actually my plan (sort of) for my online sci-fi strategy game Neptune's Pride when I ditched AdSense. I was going to hand select things on Amazon that my players would be interested in. Science Fiction books, dvd box sets, that kind of thing. Then present them to the players with my affiliate code where I would normally show a google ad. I didn't fully implement the idea because I think the affiliate rewards are so small I was worried the math didn't make it worthwhile. But I'd still like to try one day.
- mozumder 11y ago
  This method is not really for product affiliate ads (unless you have a whole shopping section of your site devoted for that...). Amazon links are for penny-chasers anyways. You're really supposed to curate display ads. But, this means you'll have to make the call to your local advertisers to actually sell the ads. ("Hey do you want to place an ad on our site for 6 months for $500? I'll take you out for pizza & beer if you're interested so we can talk details.") You're not going to sell display ads to Amazon, but you might for your local gaming shop.
  - wcummings 11y ago
    Selling all your inventory this way is incredibly unrealistic for most people.
    - mozumder 11y ago
      Then focus on developing an audience. Don't even bother chasing pennies for programmatic ads. Once you have your audience, it becomes easier to sell ads this way.
  - prawn 11y ago
    Depends on your product/service category. There are sole operators making $x0k/mo from Amazon's affiliate program because they picked an overlooked category and promoted big ticket items. 5% of a $15 book is a pittance, but 5% of something that's $x00 is a different story.
- icelancer 11y ago
  My company's blog does this for related products that we don't personally sell in our online shop. It's good to the tune for $10k/year without trying much, but you have to get good at writing the copy into real blog posts, not just random spam. It works pretty well. Conversion rate post-click of about 8.5% this month.
  - zero-rated 11y ago
    If you don't mind, please drop a link to your company blog. It's good to see examples.
eru 11y ago
How about more intelligent programs?
majani 11y ago
That would work for an independently wealthy individual blogger. Otherwise for a blog with a sales team with aspirational dreams, when the Flash SSD advertiser expresses interest in advertising, he'll go for the deal to make his commission. As the owner of the blog, you block enough such deals, and you'll have yourself a never ending sales exodus
- jarek 11y ago
  If your salesmen are suggesting SSD ads for your high-production-value female-fashion-and-lifestyle site, you need to pay more for better salesmen If you're a content farm then rock on
kaybe 11y ago
My current setup blocks almost all ads by simply blocking trackers. It's ridiculous, really, since there is no targeted adblocking going on. The only ads I see are native ones like you describe, and they're usually actually useful.
- fjarlq 11y ago
  What blocker are you using, and what config?
  - kawera 11y ago
    Set Ghostery to block everything and opt-out of info sharing. Almost all ads magically disappear.
    - kaybe 11y ago
      Basically yes. I also have httpsEverywhere and a newly added Privacy Badger, but they don't seem to change anything.
bsaul 11y ago
That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands. Ad networks work by letting you select categories, but not much more. Obviously that's because they want to keep control and maximize short-term revenues.
- avn2109 11y ago
  >> "That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands." Unfortunately, you have just reinvented publisher-direct deals, a mainstay of many ad networks for the past decade.
benihana 11y ago
>The correct answer is to never Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing: what programming language should I use? what should the next move of my business be? is she really the one, or should I move on? Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.
- spdustin 11y ago
  I won't speak to the sarcasm-as-argument response, but I will say that there is a sentiment behind it that I do agree with. I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach: "I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'best practice', in my view, and that is simply to have practices that you and your team follow that serve to further your business goals and meet your business requirements. SharePoint isn't a best practice, but a system to support a corporate culture of collaboration or information sharing is a practice that many businesses can agree with. jQuery isn't a best practice, but using a framework that improves your team's productivity and helps it to meet your business' requirements - that's a good practice to follow." We need a new phrase that gets the point across without the cognitive burden of being condescending and presumptuous. Consensus practice? Common practice? Popular practice? I don't know. But I know that "best" is a superlative that is too often used to disguise a marketing goal or to dazzle the listener/reader into accepting the superiority of the person using it.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Depending on how it's used, I find "idiomatic" to be useful. Built into the meaning is that it may not translate to other areas, and most people understand that while it is a useful shorthand to making something succinct and expressive, you fall back to other things when it doesn't match well.
  - 11y ago
krisdol 11y ago
Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right. You're asking sites to remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users. Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety of ad bids, and the highest bidding ads are chosen for placement programmatically. Edit: I just visited vogue.com. Guess who served me my ad? doubleclick. It was relevant and I bet it was programmatic. Programmatic does not mean random. Ad placement programs have a lot more data to work with than any individual at the publisher. There's a lot more sense to it than manual prediction
- t2015_08_25 11y ago
  > remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users. Yes, that's a move toward integrity and away from endangerment and excess income. If "some higher up in marketing" doesn't understand their users, the problem is they're out-of-touch and that should be corrected, as opposed to endangering user's privacy. Currently, my tiny site operates this way, with hand-chosen Amazon ads and no google Adwords.
  - wcummings 11y ago
    >excess income I don't think this a problem most small publishers have.
    - tertius 11y ago
      They need to realize that eventually the market will drive their users elsewhere. Content is king and there is more content elsewhere. If you provide a worse user experience with the same content as another, then income will dwindle altogether. Innovate, move forward.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
NumberCruncher 11y ago
In my understading the author doesn´t have any problems with programmatic ads. He has a problem with tech companies using the same tech like programmatic ads, ignoring the laws and the right of users, helping goverments to bypass the laws and the right of users, camping billions abroad to avoid paying taxes but at the same time investing in important projects solving burning issues like the search for immortality or nuking other planets.
Retra 11y ago
Why would Vogue show you an SSD ad unless they've got data suggesting you want to see it?
- AlexandrB 11y ago
  Why would Vogue show an SSD ad at all? What does Vogue know about SSDs? Nothing. Why would I think that an ad for SSDs on Vogue tells me anything about the quality of the SSD they're hocking? It's non-information and communicates nothing about the product beyond the fact that it exists. Anyone who knows what an SSD is knows where they can buy an SSD - what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy and an SSD ad on Vogue doesn't give me any information in that regard.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Your complaints have nothing to do with Vogue, but with the uselessness of an ad in general. Even if a site were talking about SSDs, you wouldn't need an ad to tell you about them, would you?
    - elektromekatron 11y ago
      Ad networks at the moment seem to mostly provide the service of showing me pictures of things I have bought, just in case I forgot that I already own them.
  - estefan 11y ago
    > what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy In that case you need reviews, not ads.
    - AlexandrB 11y ago
      Ads can also communicate something about the quality of a branch/product based on how much the ad cost to run and which publication chose to run the ad. This is no substitute for a review, but if I see a non-targeted ad for an SSD in a tech publication that chooses ads based on what it thinks is good (I'm describing The Deck basically) it at least assures me that this SSD is not a hunk of garbage. Again this is not a lot, but a targeted ad tells me nothing. On the flip side of this, if Vogue let any old crap run as advertising in their magazine this would be a form of reputation mining - trading their good name (earned after years of operation) for some short-term profit, but no-one bats an eye when the same thing happens online even though it's subtly devaluing online properties that do the same.
j2kun 11y ago
I would love to do this on my personal blog, but how? I'm just a guy with a niche Wordpress blog who doesn't have the time to negotiate and search for ad deals. What I really want is a service that can match me with advertising firms based on the content of my site, and do the negotiations for me. And give me a means with which to contest ads if I find they're not appropriate, or the matching itself if I discover my matched company is doing something immoral. There are a few minor, but significant differences between this and programmatic ads. Do those differences make it good, or at least neutral? Does such a company exist?
voltagex_ 11y ago
Maybe I can crowdsource some help from here then - My SO has a food blog [1] which it would be nice if it were self sustaining (so ~$30USD/month for domains/hosting). She's just put up Amazon affiliate links on select articles and is still working on building traffic. Should I stay away from AdSense? Where am I going to find the ads to "hand-pick"? [1]: http://thecinnamonscrolls.com http://thecinnamonscrolls.com
- samwilliams 11y ago
  A wise thing to do with sites like these is to procure the cheapest hosting you can (for a static or wordpress site, think $2 a month) and similarly cheap domain provision (although the prices don't vary so much for these). With the right provider the users will not think that the site is noticeably slower and you won't need such high monetisation targets to break even. Then, as the site gains traffic, simply scale the level of hosting accordingly. I hope this is of use! Sam
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    $30/month is high monetisation?

jay_kyburz 11y ago

This was actually my plan (sort of) for my online sci-fi strategy game Neptune's Pride when I ditched AdSense. I was going to hand select things on Amazon that my players would be interested in. Science Fiction books, dvd box sets, that kind of thing. Then present them to the players with my affiliate code where I would normally show a google ad. I didn't fully implement the idea because I think the affiliate rewards are so small I was worried the math didn't make it worthwhile. But I'd still like to try one day.

mozumder 11y ago
This method is not really for product affiliate ads (unless you have a whole shopping section of your site devoted for that...). Amazon links are for penny-chasers anyways. You're really supposed to curate display ads. But, this means you'll have to make the call to your local advertisers to actually sell the ads. ("Hey do you want to place an ad on our site for 6 months for $500? I'll take you out for pizza & beer if you're interested so we can talk details.") You're not going to sell display ads to Amazon, but you might for your local gaming shop.
- wcummings 11y ago
  Selling all your inventory this way is incredibly unrealistic for most people.
  - mozumder 11y ago
    Then focus on developing an audience. Don't even bother chasing pennies for programmatic ads. Once you have your audience, it becomes easier to sell ads this way.
- prawn 11y ago
  Depends on your product/service category. There are sole operators making $x0k/mo from Amazon's affiliate program because they picked an overlooked category and promoted big ticket items. 5% of a $15 book is a pittance, but 5% of something that's $x00 is a different story.
icelancer 11y ago
My company's blog does this for related products that we don't personally sell in our online shop. It's good to the tune for $10k/year without trying much, but you have to get good at writing the copy into real blog posts, not just random spam. It works pretty well. Conversion rate post-click of about 8.5% this month.
- zero-rated 11y ago
  If you don't mind, please drop a link to your company blog. It's good to see examples.

eru 11y ago

How about more intelligent programs?

majani 11y ago

That would work for an independently wealthy individual blogger. Otherwise for a blog with a sales team with aspirational dreams, when the Flash SSD advertiser expresses interest in advertising, he'll go for the deal to make his commission. As the owner of the blog, you block enough such deals, and you'll have yourself a never ending sales exodus

jarek 11y ago
If your salesmen are suggesting SSD ads for your high-production-value female-fashion-and-lifestyle site, you need to pay more for better salesmen If you're a content farm then rock on

kaybe 11y ago

My current setup blocks almost all ads by simply blocking trackers. It's ridiculous, really, since there is no targeted adblocking going on. The only ads I see are native ones like you describe, and they're usually actually useful.

fjarlq 11y ago
What blocker are you using, and what config?
- kawera 11y ago
  Set Ghostery to block everything and opt-out of info sharing. Almost all ads magically disappear.
  - kaybe 11y ago
    Basically yes. I also have httpsEverywhere and a newly added Privacy Badger, but they don't seem to change anything.

bsaul 11y ago

That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands. Ad networks work by letting you select categories, but not much more. Obviously that's because they want to keep control and maximize short-term revenues.

avn2109 11y ago
>> "That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands." Unfortunately, you have just reinvented publisher-direct deals, a mainstay of many ad networks for the past decade.

benihana 11y ago

>The correct answer is to never Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing: what programming language should I use? what should the next move of my business be? is she really the one, or should I move on? Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.

spdustin 11y ago
I won't speak to the sarcasm-as-argument response, but I will say that there is a sentiment behind it that I do agree with. I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach: "I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'best practice', in my view, and that is simply to have practices that you and your team follow that serve to further your business goals and meet your business requirements. SharePoint isn't a best practice, but a system to support a corporate culture of collaboration or information sharing is a practice that many businesses can agree with. jQuery isn't a best practice, but using a framework that improves your team's productivity and helps it to meet your business' requirements - that's a good practice to follow." We need a new phrase that gets the point across without the cognitive burden of being condescending and presumptuous. Consensus practice? Common practice? Popular practice? I don't know. But I know that "best" is a superlative that is too often used to disguise a marketing goal or to dazzle the listener/reader into accepting the superiority of the person using it.
- kbenson 11y ago
  Depending on how it's used, I find "idiomatic" to be useful. Built into the meaning is that it may not translate to other areas, and most people understand that while it is a useful shorthand to making something succinct and expressive, you fall back to other things when it doesn't match well.
- 11y ago

krisdol 11y ago

Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right. You're asking sites to remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users. Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety of ad bids, and the highest bidding ads are chosen for placement programmatically. Edit: I just visited vogue.com. Guess who served me my ad? doubleclick. It was relevant and I bet it was programmatic. Programmatic does not mean random. Ad placement programs have a lot more data to work with than any individual at the publisher. There's a lot more sense to it than manual prediction

t2015_08_25 11y ago
> remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users. Yes, that's a move toward integrity and away from endangerment and excess income. If "some higher up in marketing" doesn't understand their users, the problem is they're out-of-touch and that should be corrected, as opposed to endangering user's privacy. Currently, my tiny site operates this way, with hand-chosen Amazon ads and no google Adwords.
- wcummings 11y ago
  >excess income I don't think this a problem most small publishers have.
  - tertius 11y ago
    They need to realize that eventually the market will drive their users elsewhere. Content is king and there is more content elsewhere. If you provide a worse user experience with the same content as another, then income will dwindle altogether. Innovate, move forward.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

NumberCruncher 11y ago

In my understading the author doesn´t have any problems with programmatic ads. He has a problem with tech companies using the same tech like programmatic ads, ignoring the laws and the right of users, helping goverments to bypass the laws and the right of users, camping billions abroad to avoid paying taxes but at the same time investing in important projects solving burning issues like the search for immortality or nuking other planets.

Retra 11y ago

Why would Vogue show you an SSD ad unless they've got data suggesting you want to see it?

AlexandrB 11y ago
Why would Vogue show an SSD ad at all? What does Vogue know about SSDs? Nothing. Why would I think that an ad for SSDs on Vogue tells me anything about the quality of the SSD they're hocking? It's non-information and communicates nothing about the product beyond the fact that it exists. Anyone who knows what an SSD is knows where they can buy an SSD - what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy and an SSD ad on Vogue doesn't give me any information in that regard.
- Retra 11y ago
  Your complaints have nothing to do with Vogue, but with the uselessness of an ad in general. Even if a site were talking about SSDs, you wouldn't need an ad to tell you about them, would you?
  - elektromekatron 11y ago
    Ad networks at the moment seem to mostly provide the service of showing me pictures of things I have bought, just in case I forgot that I already own them.
- estefan 11y ago
  > what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy In that case you need reviews, not ads.
  - AlexandrB 11y ago
    Ads can also communicate something about the quality of a branch/product based on how much the ad cost to run and which publication chose to run the ad. This is no substitute for a review, but if I see a non-targeted ad for an SSD in a tech publication that chooses ads based on what it thinks is good (I'm describing The Deck basically) it at least assures me that this SSD is not a hunk of garbage. Again this is not a lot, but a targeted ad tells me nothing. On the flip side of this, if Vogue let any old crap run as advertising in their magazine this would be a form of reputation mining - trading their good name (earned after years of operation) for some short-term profit, but no-one bats an eye when the same thing happens online even though it's subtly devaluing online properties that do the same.

j2kun 11y ago

I would love to do this on my personal blog, but how? I'm just a guy with a niche Wordpress blog who doesn't have the time to negotiate and search for ad deals. What I really want is a service that can match me with advertising firms based on the content of my site, and do the negotiations for me. And give me a means with which to contest ads if I find they're not appropriate, or the matching itself if I discover my matched company is doing something immoral. There are a few minor, but significant differences between this and programmatic ads. Do those differences make it good, or at least neutral? Does such a company exist?

voltagex_ 11y ago

Maybe I can crowdsource some help from here then - My SO has a food blog [1] which it would be nice if it were self sustaining (so ~$30USD/month for domains/hosting). She's just put up Amazon affiliate links on select articles and is still working on building traffic. Should I stay away from AdSense? Where am I going to find the ads to "hand-pick"? [1]: http://thecinnamonscrolls.com http://thecinnamonscrolls.com

samwilliams 11y ago
A wise thing to do with sites like these is to procure the cheapest hosting you can (for a static or wordpress site, think $2 a month) and similarly cheap domain provision (although the prices don't vary so much for these). With the right provider the users will not think that the site is noticeably slower and you won't need such high monetisation targets to break even. Then, as the site gains traffic, simply scale the level of hosting accordingly. I hope this is of use! Sam
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  $30/month is high monetisation?