4 ms·

revenue from impressions is a speculative hogwash remnant of the print medium and needs to go The idea one makes money from ads simply by having it displayed i

by doron 17y ago

revenue from impressions is a speculative hogwash remnant of the print medium and needs to go The idea one makes money from ads simply by having it displayed is copying a highly speculative advertising model of print (where the effect can hardly be measured) to the web (where you can measure it be by actual clicks) put simply its vaporware of the worst kind, and a business that hedges its revenue on this model is hedging its existence on speculation alone. The premise of advertising on the web is highly informed by age old print models that have failed that industry and put into doubt the efficacy of anything that is uttered in them. users have a choice. You want effective Ads on the web, offer the users something,so they wont block you. or go away. effective Ads on the web are to be about incentive. I own the delivery device, i can manipulate it as i will. This is not a newspaper, i control it, not the vendor. i will do what i want with it. the business owner need to give me a an incentive.

mrkurt 17y ago
I almost agree with you about the speculative nature of CPM based ads, but there's value in running branding campaigns, particularly for the kinds of companies that advertise on our site (I work for Ars). It's awfully hard to measure that value in any kind of meaningful way, but brand awareness is worth spending money on in many cases.
Tichy 17y ago
I was surprised that Ars is payed by impressions, I thought it is all pay per click these days.
- mrkurt 17y ago
  It depends where the ads are running. Ads you see on big content sites are almost always on a CPM model. Fixed price ads (like you see on TechCrunch or TheDeck) are generally based on a CPM rate. Pay per click ads aren't generally worth enough money to sustain sites that produce content. Aggregators, search engines, social networks, etc, have a much, much lower cost per pageview, and can do pretty well. On Ars, we'd need to average about 50,000 pageviews per normal post to pay the writer for it with something like Google AdSense. And that's assuming that the campaigns AdSense picks are pretty good. There are whitepaper links and stuff you can get much better CPC rates for, but those generally only work if you're sneaky about them and embed them in content, or make them look like site resources.

by doron 17y ago

mrkurt 17y ago

I almost agree with you about the speculative nature of CPM based ads, but there's value in running branding campaigns, particularly for the kinds of companies that advertise on our site (I work for Ars). It's awfully hard to measure that value in any kind of meaningful way, but brand awareness is worth spending money on in many cases.

Tichy 17y ago

I was surprised that Ars is payed by impressions, I thought it is all pay per click these days.

mrkurt 17y ago
It depends where the ads are running. Ads you see on big content sites are almost always on a CPM model. Fixed price ads (like you see on TechCrunch or TheDeck) are generally based on a CPM rate. Pay per click ads aren't generally worth enough money to sustain sites that produce content. Aggregators, search engines, social networks, etc, have a much, much lower cost per pageview, and can do pretty well. On Ars, we'd need to average about 50,000 pageviews per normal post to pay the writer for it with something like Google AdSense. And that's assuming that the campaigns AdSense picks are pretty good. There are whitepaper links and stuff you can get much better CPC rates for, but those generally only work if you're sneaky about them and embed them in content, or make them look like site resources.