18 ms·

Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. That doesn't solve anyone's problem, because almost no one is famous. How can

by fiatjaf 10y ago

Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. That doesn't solve anyone's problem, because almost no one is famous. How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner?

yoz-y 10y ago
I had an idea at some point, but I do not know it if would be feasible. For me it seems that sponsorships/native ads are better than the usual banner style intrusive ads. Would it be possible to still have a syndicated ad network, but that it would feed you articles in some structured format, that you would get on your backend, and then insert as articles into your blog/website? This way you could format them any way you want. Of course the payment model would have to shift from displays to something like overall performance of the ads (by scanning outbound clicks and associating them with purchases) and pay by month. And some policing in order to avoid stuff like getting the ad from the network and never actually displaying it.
- blauditore 10y ago
  What you describe sounds similar to affiliate marketing [1]: Post a link to external services and get commission for clicks (maybe depending on conversion). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
  - yoz-y 10y ago
    But in the case of affiliate marketing you get the links and as content creator you create the ad copy. What I was thinking was kind of an automation of these kind of posts: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/23/storyworth http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/23/storyworth Or some other way to deliver ads with copy and images, but through the backend. (that way the website author has complete power on what an ad actually can do on their website)
    - sirclueless 10y ago
      Affiliates work fine for E-commerce and performance advertisers that can track conversions. They work considerably less well for cost-per-click advertisers and brand advertisers because the advertisers can't trust the publishers either; there are plenty of spammy publishers who will send fake clicks and impressions your way for $$. This is the major reason ad networks put JS on publisher sites. You can't give a website author "complete power" any more than you can give an advertiser complete power.
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    Awesome. I never thought of affiliate marketing as a model for all kinds of ads, but perhaps it can work that way. Is there any affiliate-marketing-hub or something like that? The problem with affiliate marketing is that you must trust the advertiser in reporting conversions and paying. You can trust Amazon and some other businesses that way, but not a small business.
    - hockeydonkey 10y ago
      There isn't a "hub" per se, but it is a rather strong community. Most affiliates operate through the larger affiliate networks as a central location of advertisers, publishers, and tracking. In most affiliate marketing programs the advertiser doesn't report the conversions - tracking and payment is handled by the affiliate network as an intermediary, which has it's own pros and cons. But they will fight for affiliates when commissions are due. DM me if you'd like to talk more about that, I work in the industry.
    - blauditore 10y ago
      Well, you can still track number of clicks by yourself to get a ballpark figure. You'll just have to believe the conversion number they tell you, but should be able to estimate whether it's realistic or total nonsense based on conversion rate.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  I had an idea some time ago that would work somewhat like this: whenever you mention some kind of service or product in your articles, you would link those words to something like "https://myadnetwork.com/<kind-of-service>" https://myadnetwork.com/<kind-of-service>", then the ad network would redirect the user to some paying advertiser. Fallback URLs, location (for local businesses) and other customization options could be used to make it work better. Some _optional_ Javascript could also enhance this, but not change it fundamentally.
  - wastedhours 10y ago
    Isn't that partly what Skimlinks [0] does? Not only automatically converts product links to affiliate ones, but I think they also link specific product mentions. [0] https://skimlinks.com/publishers https://skimlinks.com/publishers
giancarlostoro 10y ago
I guess by supporting the "good" ad networks, if there's any that don't spam your service with 50 iframes and divs and just return simple ads no strings attached. That or if you're hosting a blog, use a known free host. I see Tumblr is working on allowing users to monetize their blogs and get a cut from the profits.
lazyjones 10y ago
> How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr Not enough traction? Someone has to start using it, people will adapt...
- kiba 10y ago
  Patreon seems to be a better model, to be honest. It's about nine million dollars a month in total pledge, which meant over one hundred million in revenue per year if it never grows beyond that.
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    I prefer Flattr's model to Patreon, as it lets me spread donations around without much commitment, e.g. when googling for error messages and finding helpful blog posts. A Flattr<->Patreon bridge might be a nice idea, so creators using one can receive donations from the other. Unfortunately Flattr's mechanisms for transfering money were overly complicated when I used to use it: to keep down third-party transfer fees, each Flattr account maintained its own balance, and could be manually topped up or withdrawn from in bulk using a relatively obscure payment gateway. This obscurity and manual intervention discouraged topping up, and made it very easy to forget. I also seem to remember those receiving Flattrs being unable to withdraw anything until they reached a certain minimum balance, which was difficult to achieve for a relatively unknown network of micropayments. I'd probably start using it again, if I could forget about my "Flattr balance" and just have it automatically top-up by $X from my bank account via some common gateway, whenever there's not enough to cover the end-of-month payment; I could then manage it in the same way as my existing charity donations. EDIT: The above was based on my experience in Flattr's first few years of existence. I've just logged in and there now seem to be many more payment methods, and an auto-topup option :)
  - staticautomatic 10y ago
    Gross revenue, that is, before the content creators are paid out.
    - 10y ago
mrweasel 10y ago
It also doesn't solve the issues for most advertisers. I can't imagine that a large e-commerce site would want to make thousands of individual deals with sites that may or may not generate the desired traffic. His solution doesn't really scale, for the advertisers, which is why the ad networks exists. My main issue with ad networks is that they simply aren't technically competent enough to run an internet facing business. Most of them seem to be run by good sales people and not so good IT staff. Most of those I've dealt with simply doesn't understand how the internet works.
- night815 10y ago
  "Most of them seem to be run by good sales people and not so good IT staff." Sounds like a good solution to me.
  - saiya-jin 10y ago
    no, good solution would be having good IT people with good sales, nothing less
  - mrweasel 10y ago
    In terms of profit I'm sure it fine, but if you want a stable and fast ad network, free of malware and viruses then you need the best IT staff money can buy. It may also hurt profits, because you security team would reject some customers.
- croon 10y ago
  > It also doesn't solve the issues for most advertisers. I can't imagine that a large e-commerce site would want to make thousands of individual deals with sites that may or may not generate the desired traffic. Agreed. Idea: Is it possible to replace ad networks with ad brokers? The broker keeps a ledger of interested parties on both sides. Someone looking to buy ad space specifies relevant market segments (data analysts, single moms, golfers, etc), and the broker connects them to relevant sites. Metrics could be solved by passing a token when linking back to ad space buyer, or the broker still embedding, but much less intrusively than an ad network, both the blog/site and the ad space buyer tracking independently and reporting back to broker for backwards statistics, etc. I'm sure there are other issues, but this is just off the top of my head.
sverige 10y ago
>Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. I was thinking the same thing. He also has a relatively narrow range of content with an audience that is highly likely to be interested in what his sponsors are offering. What is the solution for sites that have a much broader audience? It seems like the sponsorship model would become something like NPR's where you're generically trying to target "upper- and upper-middle-class" people with an opportunity for virtue signaling by providing a brief blurb about your foundation's activities or a generic description of the services you offer. Not helpful for most sites.
alkonaut 10y ago
I think charging money (paywall, donations) is the only acceptable way for sites that can't do "big player" ads such as finding sponsors or having native advertising.
- rtpg 10y ago
  Patreon has proven itself to be a good model for a lot of bloggers out there with the right kind of following. The main issue is that to replace all advertising revenue across the board, everybody would need to pitch in something like $150/month. I like paying for things to get rid of ads, and I'm not even sure I'd make that commitment.
  - jerf 10y ago
    Where is your $150/month coming from? I'm not convinced the average user is worth that much in ads per month. The numbers I've seen coming out of Facebook put it in low-single digit dollars per month per user for Facebook, and I would tend to imagine they're getting more out than many rather than less. But, honest question, if you've got a good source on that I'd love to see it. (There's also the fact that the utility of ads is fundamentally bounded by what they can make you spend. By their nature, the amount someone is willing to spend to remove ads and the amount of money ads can possibly be making on the person are probably held more tightly than you might expect, due to the underlying third-factor of correlation with the amount of money the person in question can spend.)
    - chriswarbo 10y ago
      > Where is your $150/month coming from? The unfortunate thing is we're already paying that money, since the money spent by companies on ads comes out of the revenue we give them for goods and services. Hence we can afford to support things through Patreon, Flattr, etc. instead of through ads, if the existing money were shuffled around. We probably can't do it as well as through ads, but to free up that money the sellers of goods and services would have to stop charging us for their ads, and there's no incentive for them to do that :(
bazillion 10y ago
I built what I believe to be the most sane way to "advertise" something: Let people buy directly from an image. This solves the problem of people not interested in the content, because of its unobtrusive nature -- if they don't hover over an item within the image, it's as if the "advertisement" isn't there. Check out my demo (desktop only) at http://www.worldlifestyle.com/testpost http://www.worldlifestyle.com/testpost My website which you can sign up for the (free) beta at: http://pleenq.com http://pleenq.com
- skykooler 10y ago
  It also looks like a lot of extra work per image to set up all the regions.
  - bazillion 10y ago
    It's extra work, but is more contextual. You could, for instance, link to wikipedia articles, imdb articles (for actors) etc. and not just link to ad content. Really what it does is help define what is inside an image.
    - protomikron 10y ago
      Although I despise ads, I have to admit your tech is nice. Do you do automatic image segmentation, or are these images "hand-labeled" (I can not imagine that would scale)? If it's automatic - is it calculated server-side or client-side?
      - bazillion 10y ago
        They're hand-labeled. In the future, I'm sure I'll be hiring a bunch of Google people to build the "automatic" part.
  - jasonlotito 10y ago
    Not a lot of extra work when compared to the amount of work that goes into existing advertising campaigns.
imagist 10y ago
Almost no one makes money off ads either. Sure, a lot of the people you can think of with websites make their money off ads, but that works because they're probably very famous.
- jrnichols 10y ago
  That's in part because every "How to make money at home" blog lists "Start a blog, put ads on it" as one of their tips. I tried that a few years ago. In a year, I made about $1.75 from ad revenue. I'm an awful blogger. There are a lot of awful blogs out there too, though.
gpderetta 10y ago
The problem is that the current add model has converged to a local optimum (or, better 'pessimum'). The race to the bottom has lead to extremely obtrusive, performance-destroying, privacy invading, cheap-for-the-advertiser ads (when not actual malware); additionally has lead to a proliferation of content farms on one side and to the watering down of actual content on what were originally proper sources; finally, the availability of free content, even if of low quality, has made it very hard to build a profitable for-pay model. Actively boycotting the current status quo by making ads no longer viable can be a way to force the system to settle to a different optimum.
lmm 10y ago
The supply/demand curve is not in favour of getting paid to blog. Lots of people enjoy blogging and do it for free. Unless you can offer value that those people don't, I recommend finding another way to make money.
easytiger 10y ago
It's a blog.. stop trying to monetise it if you don't want to play the game. You don't have to get paid for it
imgabe 10y ago
Do ad networks work for anyone who isn't "famous" in some sense? Making money with advertising requires a sizable audience any way you cut it.
pjmlp 10y ago
> How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner? Paying for content like we do with physical objects, instead of expecting others to give us content for free.
devmop 10y ago
I'd like to see an ad-network which you can pay and they'll serve you transparent ads instead. The underlying content providers still get their pay per view, the ad network is still in the loop and no one needs to implement anything new - the technology is already built.
thinkMOAR 10y ago
Not only famous, but i assume a 'Microsoft Regional Director' makes enough money to pay for a hosted blog. Though great to see that there is a site less on the internet leaking their visitor information to ad networks and their affiliates....
- dublinben 10y ago
  Apparently that title is an honorary one, and does not actually confer any financial benefits directly from Microsoft. [0] [0] http://www.thewindowsclub.com/microsoft-regional-director-program http://www.thewindowsclub.com/microsoft-regional-director-pr...
- aembleton 10y ago
  He's still leaking visitor information to Google Analytics.
erikb 10y ago
It's not really a solution, agreed. But the problem isn't one either. The problem is that most people don't have a business model, and just hope someone else comes and solves that for them (the ad company).
ThomPete 10y ago
If you think you need to be famous to get sponsorship working you really should consider how hard it is to advertising working. You are mostly making money if you have an insane number of visitors. You don't need to be famous to get sponsorship, plenty of companies are willing to pay at a minimum your cost with a mailing list around 5K people. I actually think that a sponsorship model works much better even if you aren't famous or have many users as you can most probably offset that by giving access to a much better audience.
ProAm 10y ago
> How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner? you answered this yourself, get famous. Put enough effort and quality into your work to not need ads.
vintageseltzer 10y ago
May I ask: if one is not "famous" (i.e. popular), why should one expect their site to be profitable from ads alone? If my limited edition, 250-prints-per-month 'zine isn't making money, is that the advertising industry's fault, or is there an issue with my expectations? People ask the "how do we fix dwindling ad-based revenue" question all the time. The answer is clear, it's just not what people want to hear: metered paywalls or a subscription model (or, you know, selling an actual product / service). The inevitable response to that is, 'but I don't make enough money off of that.' Well, there you go! To me, that's where it should end. You don't have enough of a readership to support your website as-is. That means you can continue doing it as a labor of love, scale it down to something you can manage and that is profitable, or just, well, accept that your site isn't as great as you thought it was, and that you won't be making as much money off of it as you thought. Isn't this basic market forces at work? I have a suspicion that even if 50% of these sites bloated with ads and deceptive, click-bait content were to die, society as a whole would actually be much better off, and the efforts of people building these kinds of sites and expecting a return would be better directed elsewhere.
- arjie 10y ago
  Seems a bit disingenuous to suggest a paywall when the first thing anyone does on this website with a paywalled article is attempt to bypass. Such a bad faith move to say "use a paywall" and then promptly follow it up with "and I'll try to bypass it to access the content".
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    If a site wishes to implement a paywall that is their right. If they wish to implement a bypass, that is also just fine. They choose to implement this bypass because they wish to be indexed by Google. So why shouldn't we make use of that intentionally implement bypass?
    - arjie 10y ago
      Do whatever you find ethical. I'm just here to ensure that people are well informed about the fact that paywall vs. ads is actually paywall with no search engine access vs. paywall which people won't pay for vs. ads. I'm all right with the paywall idea succeeding or failing in a well informed marketplace of ideas.
rhapsodyv 10y ago
Another point: Facebook is increasily adding features so people don't need to leave to read or anything else. How ad networks will adapt to that? In a short or mid-term future aren't just the famous and niche content blog that will survive? Just thoughts...
krapp 10y ago
Saner and better would be most content producers being unable to make a living on the internet - and no one at all being able to do so through advertising. The more content there is that attempts to be commercial, the lower the quality becomes overall for the consumer, because that content tends to optimize for clickbait and metrics rather than actual value. If you can't convince people that your content is worth paying for, then you don't deserve to be paid for it. That's the way it works everywhere else, and finally the web is starting to correct the illusion that it's the one domain where supply and demand doesn't apply.
mholt 10y ago
If you have something worth getting money for, sell it. I'd happily pay to read quality content that I'm interested in if it doesn't have ads.
2ion 10y ago
This person for the reason of being famous can afford to run their own personal website based on a sponsorship model. Though I find it hilarious that some people are even OK with paying him anything to begin with as the cost of running such a side project with the salary and benefits of a "Microsoft Regional Director", which has to be plenty, is pretty much coffee-to-go-like small change. Looks pretty greedy to me.
- MikeCharnock 10y ago
  Microsoft Regional Director is a non-paid advisory role. You find it hilarious? I find it disappointing you would make such a comment without even cursory research. http://rd.microsoft.com/FAQ http://rd.microsoft.com/FAQ
newscracker 10y ago
> Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. That doesn't solve anyone's problem, because almost no one is famous. He's famous, creates courses for Pluralsight, is a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals (paraphrased from the page). He also runs haveibeenpwned.com, a site that focuses on security breaches. One would think that such a person would probably not want to run any kind of ads with any ad networks in the first place. And he argues against ad blockers in another article because someone updated EasyList with references to his ad code and states that this back-and-forth war between publishers and ad-blockers is not healthy, which is a good point. But as long as publishers use ad networks that don't care a damn about tracking, malware and other issues, I'm glad we have ad blockers and people who keep things like EasyList updated regularly. Personally, I don't like the large image on his pages right at the top stretching all the way down, with almost no readable content without scrolling down (this depends on the screen size and the browser window size).
Kalium 10y ago
Ad networks provide a relatively low-effort way to turn eyeballs into dollars. That's why they are popular. Replacing them with something better and saner has to win on those criteria and pay at least as well. This, to date, has proven a tall order.
Fnoord 10y ago
> Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. Famous people have a quality network. Are you sure its not rather because "you have a quality network" instead of "you are probably [sic] very famous"?
wrsh07 10y ago
[I agree, let's solve the general problem]. Consider a not-famous person Em who writes posts. Most posts don't get enough views to be profitable anyway, but Em has ads in case one of their posts goes viral. Viral posts are only successful while they're on the front page of HN, so Em can't wait until they have a successful post to get a sponsorship. How can we enable Em to profit from their successful post without all the ad network code? [Famous people can do sponsorship. Not famous people wouldn't make much money from ads anyway - maybe a hundred bucks a month. What about the sometimes famous?]
nradov 10y ago
Micropayments would be better and saner. But implementation would require creation of new technical standards by a broad-based coalition of content creators, content aggregators, browser vendors, and financial services. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-payments-predictions-for-2001-revisited/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-payments-predictions-f...
cripblip 10y ago
I would love the following: Charge up an account with $n Every time I visit a site, have the ability to pay n cents to view (with whitelist /auto bill to max per day) Gated auto reload with alerting I pay a buck a month to Wikipedia. I have a New York Times subscription but I would rather just pay as I go across the board. There is great content out there (I would pay for Hn using this model) but I don't want a million subscriptions
Mz 10y ago
You can actually do a tip jar. I probably should stop saying this, because no one pays any attention. Sigh. But, honest, it can be done. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-paypal-tip-jar.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-... I don't make a lot of money via tips -- and some of my sites still have ads -- but I make more via tips than ads. I think as I get more traffic, I will get more tips. And I would rather have my audience support my writing than some "sponsor." At some point, I might also do Patreon.
d2p 10y ago
Although not as many, there are ways to include ads that are not scripts. My blog has a DJI banner that's just an anchor with an image tag; proper old-skool! :-) Of course, it doesn't make any money because I'm no famous; but at least I can pretend and I don't need to compromise anything with unknown JS =)

by fiatjaf 10y ago

yoz-y 10y ago

I had an idea at some point, but I do not know it if would be feasible. For me it seems that sponsorships/native ads are better than the usual banner style intrusive ads. Would it be possible to still have a syndicated ad network, but that it would feed you articles in some structured format, that you would get on your backend, and then insert as articles into your blog/website? This way you could format them any way you want. Of course the payment model would have to shift from displays to something like overall performance of the ads (by scanning outbound clicks and associating them with purchases) and pay by month. And some policing in order to avoid stuff like getting the ad from the network and never actually displaying it.

blauditore 10y ago
What you describe sounds similar to affiliate marketing [1]: Post a link to external services and get commission for clicks (maybe depending on conversion). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing
- yoz-y 10y ago
  But in the case of affiliate marketing you get the links and as content creator you create the ad copy. What I was thinking was kind of an automation of these kind of posts: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/23/storyworth http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/23/storyworth Or some other way to deliver ads with copy and images, but through the backend. (that way the website author has complete power on what an ad actually can do on their website)
  - sirclueless 10y ago
    Affiliates work fine for E-commerce and performance advertisers that can track conversions. They work considerably less well for cost-per-click advertisers and brand advertisers because the advertisers can't trust the publishers either; there are plenty of spammy publishers who will send fake clicks and impressions your way for $$. This is the major reason ad networks put JS on publisher sites. You can't give a website author "complete power" any more than you can give an advertiser complete power.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Awesome. I never thought of affiliate marketing as a model for all kinds of ads, but perhaps it can work that way. Is there any affiliate-marketing-hub or something like that? The problem with affiliate marketing is that you must trust the advertiser in reporting conversions and paying. You can trust Amazon and some other businesses that way, but not a small business.
  - hockeydonkey 10y ago
    There isn't a "hub" per se, but it is a rather strong community. Most affiliates operate through the larger affiliate networks as a central location of advertisers, publishers, and tracking. In most affiliate marketing programs the advertiser doesn't report the conversions - tracking and payment is handled by the affiliate network as an intermediary, which has it's own pros and cons. But they will fight for affiliates when commissions are due. DM me if you'd like to talk more about that, I work in the industry.
  - blauditore 10y ago
    Well, you can still track number of clicks by yourself to get a ballpark figure. You'll just have to believe the conversion number they tell you, but should be able to estimate whether it's realistic or total nonsense based on conversion rate.
fiatjaf 10y ago
I had an idea some time ago that would work somewhat like this: whenever you mention some kind of service or product in your articles, you would link those words to something like "https://myadnetwork.com/<kind-of-service>" https://myadnetwork.com/<kind-of-service>", then the ad network would redirect the user to some paying advertiser. Fallback URLs, location (for local businesses) and other customization options could be used to make it work better. Some _optional_ Javascript could also enhance this, but not change it fundamentally.
- wastedhours 10y ago
  Isn't that partly what Skimlinks [0] does? Not only automatically converts product links to affiliate ones, but I think they also link specific product mentions. [0] https://skimlinks.com/publishers https://skimlinks.com/publishers

giancarlostoro 10y ago

I guess by supporting the "good" ad networks, if there's any that don't spam your service with 50 iframes and divs and just return simple ads no strings attached. That or if you're hosting a blog, use a known free host. I see Tumblr is working on allowing users to monetize their blogs and get a cut from the profits.

lazyjones 10y ago

> How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr Not enough traction? Someone has to start using it, people will adapt...

kiba 10y ago
Patreon seems to be a better model, to be honest. It's about nine million dollars a month in total pledge, which meant over one hundred million in revenue per year if it never grows beyond that.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  I prefer Flattr's model to Patreon, as it lets me spread donations around without much commitment, e.g. when googling for error messages and finding helpful blog posts. A Flattr<->Patreon bridge might be a nice idea, so creators using one can receive donations from the other. Unfortunately Flattr's mechanisms for transfering money were overly complicated when I used to use it: to keep down third-party transfer fees, each Flattr account maintained its own balance, and could be manually topped up or withdrawn from in bulk using a relatively obscure payment gateway. This obscurity and manual intervention discouraged topping up, and made it very easy to forget. I also seem to remember those receiving Flattrs being unable to withdraw anything until they reached a certain minimum balance, which was difficult to achieve for a relatively unknown network of micropayments. I'd probably start using it again, if I could forget about my "Flattr balance" and just have it automatically top-up by $X from my bank account via some common gateway, whenever there's not enough to cover the end-of-month payment; I could then manage it in the same way as my existing charity donations. EDIT: The above was based on my experience in Flattr's first few years of existence. I've just logged in and there now seem to be many more payment methods, and an auto-topup option :)
- staticautomatic 10y ago
  Gross revenue, that is, before the content creators are paid out.
  - 10y ago

mrweasel 10y ago

It also doesn't solve the issues for most advertisers. I can't imagine that a large e-commerce site would want to make thousands of individual deals with sites that may or may not generate the desired traffic. His solution doesn't really scale, for the advertisers, which is why the ad networks exists. My main issue with ad networks is that they simply aren't technically competent enough to run an internet facing business. Most of them seem to be run by good sales people and not so good IT staff. Most of those I've dealt with simply doesn't understand how the internet works.

night815 10y ago
"Most of them seem to be run by good sales people and not so good IT staff." Sounds like a good solution to me.
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  no, good solution would be having good IT people with good sales, nothing less
- mrweasel 10y ago
  In terms of profit I'm sure it fine, but if you want a stable and fast ad network, free of malware and viruses then you need the best IT staff money can buy. It may also hurt profits, because you security team would reject some customers.
croon 10y ago
> It also doesn't solve the issues for most advertisers. I can't imagine that a large e-commerce site would want to make thousands of individual deals with sites that may or may not generate the desired traffic. Agreed. Idea: Is it possible to replace ad networks with ad brokers? The broker keeps a ledger of interested parties on both sides. Someone looking to buy ad space specifies relevant market segments (data analysts, single moms, golfers, etc), and the broker connects them to relevant sites. Metrics could be solved by passing a token when linking back to ad space buyer, or the broker still embedding, but much less intrusively than an ad network, both the blog/site and the ad space buyer tracking independently and reporting back to broker for backwards statistics, etc. I'm sure there are other issues, but this is just off the top of my head.

sverige 10y ago

>Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. I was thinking the same thing. He also has a relatively narrow range of content with an audience that is highly likely to be interested in what his sponsors are offering. What is the solution for sites that have a much broader audience? It seems like the sponsorship model would become something like NPR's where you're generically trying to target "upper- and upper-middle-class" people with an opportunity for virtue signaling by providing a brief blurb about your foundation's activities or a generic description of the services you offer. Not helpful for most sites.

alkonaut 10y ago

I think charging money (paywall, donations) is the only acceptable way for sites that can't do "big player" ads such as finding sponsors or having native advertising.

rtpg 10y ago
Patreon has proven itself to be a good model for a lot of bloggers out there with the right kind of following. The main issue is that to replace all advertising revenue across the board, everybody would need to pitch in something like $150/month. I like paying for things to get rid of ads, and I'm not even sure I'd make that commitment.
- jerf 10y ago
  Where is your $150/month coming from? I'm not convinced the average user is worth that much in ads per month. The numbers I've seen coming out of Facebook put it in low-single digit dollars per month per user for Facebook, and I would tend to imagine they're getting more out than many rather than less. But, honest question, if you've got a good source on that I'd love to see it. (There's also the fact that the utility of ads is fundamentally bounded by what they can make you spend. By their nature, the amount someone is willing to spend to remove ads and the amount of money ads can possibly be making on the person are probably held more tightly than you might expect, due to the underlying third-factor of correlation with the amount of money the person in question can spend.)
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    > Where is your $150/month coming from? The unfortunate thing is we're already paying that money, since the money spent by companies on ads comes out of the revenue we give them for goods and services. Hence we can afford to support things through Patreon, Flattr, etc. instead of through ads, if the existing money were shuffled around. We probably can't do it as well as through ads, but to free up that money the sellers of goods and services would have to stop charging us for their ads, and there's no incentive for them to do that :(

bazillion 10y ago

I built what I believe to be the most sane way to "advertise" something: Let people buy directly from an image. This solves the problem of people not interested in the content, because of its unobtrusive nature -- if they don't hover over an item within the image, it's as if the "advertisement" isn't there. Check out my demo (desktop only) at http://www.worldlifestyle.com/testpost http://www.worldlifestyle.com/testpost My website which you can sign up for the (free) beta at: http://pleenq.com http://pleenq.com

skykooler 10y ago
It also looks like a lot of extra work per image to set up all the regions.
- bazillion 10y ago
  It's extra work, but is more contextual. You could, for instance, link to wikipedia articles, imdb articles (for actors) etc. and not just link to ad content. Really what it does is help define what is inside an image.
  - protomikron 10y ago
    Although I despise ads, I have to admit your tech is nice. Do you do automatic image segmentation, or are these images "hand-labeled" (I can not imagine that would scale)? If it's automatic - is it calculated server-side or client-side?
    - bazillion 10y ago
      They're hand-labeled. In the future, I'm sure I'll be hiring a bunch of Google people to build the "automatic" part.
- jasonlotito 10y ago
  Not a lot of extra work when compared to the amount of work that goes into existing advertising campaigns.

imagist 10y ago

Almost no one makes money off ads either. Sure, a lot of the people you can think of with websites make their money off ads, but that works because they're probably very famous.

jrnichols 10y ago
That's in part because every "How to make money at home" blog lists "Start a blog, put ads on it" as one of their tips. I tried that a few years ago. In a year, I made about $1.75 from ad revenue. I'm an awful blogger. There are a lot of awful blogs out there too, though.

gpderetta 10y ago

The problem is that the current add model has converged to a local optimum (or, better 'pessimum'). The race to the bottom has lead to extremely obtrusive, performance-destroying, privacy invading, cheap-for-the-advertiser ads (when not actual malware); additionally has lead to a proliferation of content farms on one side and to the watering down of actual content on what were originally proper sources; finally, the availability of free content, even if of low quality, has made it very hard to build a profitable for-pay model. Actively boycotting the current status quo by making ads no longer viable can be a way to force the system to settle to a different optimum.

lmm 10y ago

The supply/demand curve is not in favour of getting paid to blog. Lots of people enjoy blogging and do it for free. Unless you can offer value that those people don't, I recommend finding another way to make money.

easytiger 10y ago

It's a blog.. stop trying to monetise it if you don't want to play the game. You don't have to get paid for it

imgabe 10y ago

Do ad networks work for anyone who isn't "famous" in some sense? Making money with advertising requires a sizable audience any way you cut it.

pjmlp 10y ago

> How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner? Paying for content like we do with physical objects, instead of expecting others to give us content for free.

devmop 10y ago

I'd like to see an ad-network which you can pay and they'll serve you transparent ads instead. The underlying content providers still get their pay per view, the ad network is still in the loop and no one needs to implement anything new - the technology is already built.

thinkMOAR 10y ago

Not only famous, but i assume a 'Microsoft Regional Director' makes enough money to pay for a hosted blog. Though great to see that there is a site less on the internet leaking their visitor information to ad networks and their affiliates....

dublinben 10y ago
Apparently that title is an honorary one, and does not actually confer any financial benefits directly from Microsoft. [0] [0] http://www.thewindowsclub.com/microsoft-regional-director-program http://www.thewindowsclub.com/microsoft-regional-director-pr...
aembleton 10y ago
He's still leaking visitor information to Google Analytics.

erikb 10y ago

It's not really a solution, agreed. But the problem isn't one either. The problem is that most people don't have a business model, and just hope someone else comes and solves that for them (the ad company).

ThomPete 10y ago

If you think you need to be famous to get sponsorship working you really should consider how hard it is to advertising working. You are mostly making money if you have an insane number of visitors. You don't need to be famous to get sponsorship, plenty of companies are willing to pay at a minimum your cost with a mailing list around 5K people. I actually think that a sponsorship model works much better even if you aren't famous or have many users as you can most probably offset that by giving access to a much better audience.

ProAm 10y ago

> How can we replace ad networks with something better and saner? you answered this yourself, get famous. Put enough effort and quality into your work to not need ads.

vintageseltzer 10y ago

May I ask: if one is not "famous" (i.e. popular), why should one expect their site to be profitable from ads alone? If my limited edition, 250-prints-per-month 'zine isn't making money, is that the advertising industry's fault, or is there an issue with my expectations? People ask the "how do we fix dwindling ad-based revenue" question all the time. The answer is clear, it's just not what people want to hear: metered paywalls or a subscription model (or, you know, selling an actual product / service). The inevitable response to that is, 'but I don't make enough money off of that.' Well, there you go! To me, that's where it should end. You don't have enough of a readership to support your website as-is. That means you can continue doing it as a labor of love, scale it down to something you can manage and that is profitable, or just, well, accept that your site isn't as great as you thought it was, and that you won't be making as much money off of it as you thought. Isn't this basic market forces at work? I have a suspicion that even if 50% of these sites bloated with ads and deceptive, click-bait content were to die, society as a whole would actually be much better off, and the efforts of people building these kinds of sites and expecting a return would be better directed elsewhere.

arjie 10y ago
Seems a bit disingenuous to suggest a paywall when the first thing anyone does on this website with a paywalled article is attempt to bypass. Such a bad faith move to say "use a paywall" and then promptly follow it up with "and I'll try to bypass it to access the content".
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  If a site wishes to implement a paywall that is their right. If they wish to implement a bypass, that is also just fine. They choose to implement this bypass because they wish to be indexed by Google. So why shouldn't we make use of that intentionally implement bypass?
  - arjie 10y ago
    Do whatever you find ethical. I'm just here to ensure that people are well informed about the fact that paywall vs. ads is actually paywall with no search engine access vs. paywall which people won't pay for vs. ads. I'm all right with the paywall idea succeeding or failing in a well informed marketplace of ideas.

rhapsodyv 10y ago

Another point: Facebook is increasily adding features so people don't need to leave to read or anything else. How ad networks will adapt to that? In a short or mid-term future aren't just the famous and niche content blog that will survive? Just thoughts...

krapp 10y ago

Saner and better would be most content producers being unable to make a living on the internet - and no one at all being able to do so through advertising. The more content there is that attempts to be commercial, the lower the quality becomes overall for the consumer, because that content tends to optimize for clickbait and metrics rather than actual value. If you can't convince people that your content is worth paying for, then you don't deserve to be paid for it. That's the way it works everywhere else, and finally the web is starting to correct the illusion that it's the one domain where supply and demand doesn't apply.

mholt 10y ago

If you have something worth getting money for, sell it. I'd happily pay to read quality content that I'm interested in if it doesn't have ads.

2ion 10y ago

This person for the reason of being famous can afford to run their own personal website based on a sponsorship model. Though I find it hilarious that some people are even OK with paying him anything to begin with as the cost of running such a side project with the salary and benefits of a "Microsoft Regional Director", which has to be plenty, is pretty much coffee-to-go-like small change. Looks pretty greedy to me.

MikeCharnock 10y ago
Microsoft Regional Director is a non-paid advisory role. You find it hilarious? I find it disappointing you would make such a comment without even cursory research. http://rd.microsoft.com/FAQ http://rd.microsoft.com/FAQ

newscracker 10y ago

> Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. That doesn't solve anyone's problem, because almost no one is famous. He's famous, creates courses for Pluralsight, is a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals (paraphrased from the page). He also runs haveibeenpwned.com, a site that focuses on security breaches. One would think that such a person would probably not want to run any kind of ads with any ad networks in the first place. And he argues against ad blockers in another article because someone updated EasyList with references to his ad code and states that this back-and-forth war between publishers and ad-blockers is not healthy, which is a good point. But as long as publishers use ad networks that don't care a damn about tracking, malware and other issues, I'm glad we have ad blockers and people who keep things like EasyList updated regularly. Personally, I don't like the large image on his pages right at the top stretching all the way down, with almost no readable content without scrolling down (this depends on the screen size and the browser window size).

Kalium 10y ago

Ad networks provide a relatively low-effort way to turn eyeballs into dollars. That's why they are popular. Replacing them with something better and saner has to win on those criteria and pay at least as well. This, to date, has proven a tall order.

Fnoord 10y ago

> Ok, you have a sponsorship model that works because you're probably very famous. Famous people have a quality network. Are you sure its not rather because "you have a quality network" instead of "you are probably [sic] very famous"?

wrsh07 10y ago

[I agree, let's solve the general problem]. Consider a not-famous person Em who writes posts. Most posts don't get enough views to be profitable anyway, but Em has ads in case one of their posts goes viral. Viral posts are only successful while they're on the front page of HN, so Em can't wait until they have a successful post to get a sponsorship. How can we enable Em to profit from their successful post without all the ad network code? [Famous people can do sponsorship. Not famous people wouldn't make much money from ads anyway - maybe a hundred bucks a month. What about the sometimes famous?]

nradov 10y ago

Micropayments would be better and saner. But implementation would require creation of new technical standards by a broad-based coalition of content creators, content aggregators, browser vendors, and financial services. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-payments-predictions-for-2001-revisited/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-payments-predictions-f...

cripblip 10y ago

I would love the following: Charge up an account with $n Every time I visit a site, have the ability to pay n cents to view (with whitelist /auto bill to max per day) Gated auto reload with alerting I pay a buck a month to Wikipedia. I have a New York Times subscription but I would rather just pay as I go across the board. There is great content out there (I would pay for Hn using this model) but I don't want a million subscriptions

Mz 10y ago

You can actually do a tip jar. I probably should stop saying this, because no one pays any attention. Sigh. But, honest, it can be done. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-paypal-tip-jar.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-... I don't make a lot of money via tips -- and some of my sites still have ads -- but I make more via tips than ads. I think as I get more traffic, I will get more tips. And I would rather have my audience support my writing than some "sponsor." At some point, I might also do Patreon.

d2p 10y ago

Although not as many, there are ways to include ads that are not scripts. My blog has a DJI banner that's just an anchor with an image tag; proper old-skool! :-) Of course, it doesn't make any money because I'm no famous; but at least I can pretend and I don't need to compromise anything with unknown JS =)