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What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that: 1. Banners hurt unless they are relevant 2. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce re

by buro9 9y ago

What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that: 1. Banners hurt unless they are relevant 2. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers 3. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every metric 4. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re-writing existing links rather than inserting awful links on a word match basis) That last one is what I now do. Is it as profitable as running banners everywhere? No. But it is the highest possible engagement with some revenue, and if one focuses energy on reducing costs instead it can work well.

badestrand 9y ago
Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Have you tried Flattr, I've not used it but I see it on a lot of sites and gather it fits that niche. https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/10/24/flattr-now-lets-pay-content-creators-without-actually-anything/ https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/10/24/flattr-now-lets-pay-c... may be of interest too.
- bertil 9y ago
  pbhjpbhj is right to mention Flattr. Patreon is also a good idea. Sponsoring is also possible if you can find something relevant and willing: a lot of the podcast and YouTube channels that I follow have audiobook platforms sponsor them.
- Mz 9y ago
  I have Patreon and a Pay Pal tip jar. I still have ads on some sites. But I have fantasies that I will someday have enough revenue from other things to justify removing ads from most sites.
- dangrossman 9y ago
  It wouldn't work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100/month per household, and you'd need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can't replace that with some $10/month subscription even if everyone paid it.
  - lactinfo 9y ago
    Well it certainly won’t work with that attitude. Advertising makes me regret the internet.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    Something's not right with that equation. You're implying that on average, each household is spending over $1000 per month on things they get via the online advertising that they would otherwise not get at all. And that's just not realistic. One-off purchases, maybe. Sustained 1k/hh/mth avg - I'd love to see a proof of that.
    - dangrossman 9y ago
      Households do spend >$1000 per month on consumer goods/services (food, clothes, personal care items, etc). Those companies do spend >10% on marketing. I'm not sure what portion of it is spent online, which is what you'd need the subscription to replace. There's no implication that every dollar they spend on marketing directly translates into $10 of new spending "that they would otherwise not get at all". Much of it is brand spending. Procter & Gamble is the world's largest advertiser, and the goal of their ads is to make sure you keep picking up Tide every time you're in the detergent aisle. Coca-Cola's ads aren't trying to get you to buy $10 more of soda than last week, just to keep soda on your shopping list every week. Those ad dollars would need to be replaced by the subscription if you're going to remove the ads but keep compensation for the websites the same.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Total advertising spend worldwide is $600 billion. Online is about 1/6 of that, call it $100 billion. To a rough approximation, that's footed by the 1 billion wealthy inhabitants of the EU, US, Japan, Canada, Australian, and New Zealand. (I said rough, roll with me.) That means that the per person costs of advertising are pretty much $100 annually online and $600 annually for all content (mostly TV). Keep in mind, those are real expenses expressed through household purchases. (This means, by the way, that online content isn't free, you are paying for it, only, you're doing so indirectly, through advertisers.) By contrast, total direct expenditures on print media run about $125/person in the US. (Audio/video may add to that.) If you look at what is advertised, an awful lot is very high-ticket items. The FIRE industries (finance, insurance, real estate) were the largest chunk of spend as of a couple-three years ago. Electronics is another large segment. The notion of some sort of universal content payments scheme, preferably indexed to wealth and income, has a great deal of economic justification. I've been exploring that for the past few years. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+content+syndication&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+cont...
- drngdds 9y ago
  The Brave browser people are working on a weird cryptocurrency-based solution to this problem called the Basic Attention Token. Hope you don't mind being paid in some Ethereum tokens, though. https://basicattentiontoken.org/about/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/about/
  - d2wa 9y ago
    Brave is crazy; go with Flattr instead. They both want to distribute monthly subscriptions from users to content creators. Flattr pays in real money and is easier for users because they can use credit cards instead of virtual tokens and hard-to-fill-up crypto wallets. Flattr works with creators on YouTube, GitHub, Vimeo, etc, etc. but Brave only works on the domain-level; meaning only Google can benefit from YouTube with Brave whereas individual creators get the money with Flattr.
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  There's Google Contributor, which is trying to make another comeback. One of the newspapers in Australia is using it, and supposedly Business Insider as well. https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/
  - gwern 9y ago
    I've looked at Contributor and found it weirdly limited. Google doesn't need publishers to sign up for Contributor, because they are already all signed up for AdSense! The most logical way to implement Contributor would be essentially as a personal buyout of AdSense ads: if you are a Contributor, the AdSense JS checks that and then simply doesn't run, and assigns a fraction of a cent to the publisher in lieu of a displayed ad. Everyone gets what they want and this immediately gets you coverage of millions of websites instead of, like, 10.
    - SyneRyder 9y ago
      That's how the original Google Contributor actually worked, it would remove Adsense ads from all websites running AdSense. You could even choose what to replace them with (eg pictures of kittens). Matt Cutts posted about it here in 2015: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-contributor/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-contributor/ Apparently that model was a huge flop and people just didn't want it. The new version requires publishers to remove all ads (not just AdSense), which helps since many newspapers seem to have dropped AdSense & switched to Taboola & other ad networks. Which might be one reason Google is trying it again. (I expect the new Contributor will fail too, though. I think the majority of people just don't want to pay for online content.)
      - gwern 9y ago
        That's a pity. I expect the new optin model to work much worse; not sure why they're bothering... Patreon, IMO, shows people are willing to pay for online content but the exact method and experience matters a lot.
spc476 9y ago
Up until a week ago, I had an Amazon banner on my blog. When I set it up (about a decade ago), you had the ability to specify a search term in the URL of the banner, and I used this. For each post, I would have a targeted search term to use to display the Amazon banner. Sometime in the past month or two Amazon got rid of that feature and so I was only getting a generic Amazon sales banner. I'm not sure why they changed, but they did, and I removed the banner. Thanks Amazon.
- zerocrates 9y ago
  They probably determined your page-relevant term was just getting in the way of their killer machine-learning tuned strategy of showing ads for the last thing the user happened to look at.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    Or better, slight variations on the most recent purchase
  - spc476 9y ago
    If it was a banner of products related to previous purchases, okay, I can see that. But the banner was just a generic "Shop at Amazon!" Lame.
    - yeldarb 9y ago
      Do you use Ghostery or other “do not track” tools? It’s possible your users were seeing something different
      - spc476 9y ago
        Nope. I have no ad blockers installed. I also checked the Amazon affiliate website and the new banner ads (at the size I wanted) no longer have the option I was used to.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Antrikshy 9y ago
How do you have experience running hundreds of forums? :O
- jefozabuss 9y ago
  Step 1: Run hundreds of forums
- buro9 9y ago
  I've been running forums since 1996 using almost every major forum software that has existed. I'm currently running my own software (which we tried and failed to commercialise), and the largest forum I run is https://www.lfgss.com/ https://www.lfgss.com/ with 250k monthly unique visitors, but the long tail is very long. We actually now survive more on donations from forum users than any advertising. About 2/3 revenue is donations, 1/3 from affiliates. Affiliates work really well, but the rise of cash back sites mean that the revenue per sale is dropping. Affiliates work well for delivering new customers, but cash back is leading to retailers paying out for retaining customers which means the cost is shifting from acquisition to retention, which is traditionally where they make their profit. Hence cash back is leading retailers to make the terms far more strict, shorter cookie periods, lower %, etc. Donations have been the saviour. As I'm running the sites as a platform, the larger sites effectively subsidise the young and growing sites. Also, as a platform: 1 volunteer (me) runs all of the sites. Moderation is by communities, and has proven very effective whilst not requiring any additional cost. Though I did invest in some good lawyers for the T&Cs to make sure that approach kept the platform free of liability from individual sites on the platform.

by buro9 9y ago

badestrand 9y ago

Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Have you tried Flattr, I've not used it but I see it on a lot of sites and gather it fits that niche. https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/10/24/flattr-now-lets-pay-content-creators-without-actually-anything/ https://thenextweb.com/tech/2017/10/24/flattr-now-lets-pay-c... may be of interest too.
bertil 9y ago
pbhjpbhj is right to mention Flattr. Patreon is also a good idea. Sponsoring is also possible if you can find something relevant and willing: a lot of the podcast and YouTube channels that I follow have audiobook platforms sponsor them.
Mz 9y ago
I have Patreon and a Pay Pal tip jar. I still have ads on some sites. But I have fantasies that I will someday have enough revenue from other things to justify removing ads from most sites.
dangrossman 9y ago
It wouldn't work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100/month per household, and you'd need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can't replace that with some $10/month subscription even if everyone paid it.
- lactinfo 9y ago
  Well it certainly won’t work with that attitude. Advertising makes me regret the internet.
- viraptor 9y ago
  Something's not right with that equation. You're implying that on average, each household is spending over $1000 per month on things they get via the online advertising that they would otherwise not get at all. And that's just not realistic. One-off purchases, maybe. Sustained 1k/hh/mth avg - I'd love to see a proof of that.
  - dangrossman 9y ago
    Households do spend >$1000 per month on consumer goods/services (food, clothes, personal care items, etc). Those companies do spend >10% on marketing. I'm not sure what portion of it is spent online, which is what you'd need the subscription to replace. There's no implication that every dollar they spend on marketing directly translates into $10 of new spending "that they would otherwise not get at all". Much of it is brand spending. Procter & Gamble is the world's largest advertiser, and the goal of their ads is to make sure you keep picking up Tide every time you're in the detergent aisle. Coca-Cola's ads aren't trying to get you to buy $10 more of soda than last week, just to keep soda on your shopping list every week. Those ad dollars would need to be replaced by the subscription if you're going to remove the ads but keep compensation for the websites the same.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Total advertising spend worldwide is $600 billion. Online is about 1/6 of that, call it $100 billion. To a rough approximation, that's footed by the 1 billion wealthy inhabitants of the EU, US, Japan, Canada, Australian, and New Zealand. (I said rough, roll with me.) That means that the per person costs of advertising are pretty much $100 annually online and $600 annually for all content (mostly TV). Keep in mind, those are real expenses expressed through household purchases. (This means, by the way, that online content isn't free, you are paying for it, only, you're doing so indirectly, through advertisers.) By contrast, total direct expenditures on print media run about $125/person in the US. (Audio/video may add to that.) If you look at what is advertised, an awful lot is very high-ticket items. The FIRE industries (finance, insurance, real estate) were the largest chunk of spend as of a couple-three years ago. Electronics is another large segment. The notion of some sort of universal content payments scheme, preferably indexed to wealth and income, has a great deal of economic justification. I've been exploring that for the past few years. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+content+syndication&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+cont...
drngdds 9y ago
The Brave browser people are working on a weird cryptocurrency-based solution to this problem called the Basic Attention Token. Hope you don't mind being paid in some Ethereum tokens, though. https://basicattentiontoken.org/about/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/about/
- d2wa 9y ago
  Brave is crazy; go with Flattr instead. They both want to distribute monthly subscriptions from users to content creators. Flattr pays in real money and is easier for users because they can use credit cards instead of virtual tokens and hard-to-fill-up crypto wallets. Flattr works with creators on YouTube, GitHub, Vimeo, etc, etc. but Brave only works on the domain-level; meaning only Google can benefit from YouTube with Brave whereas individual creators get the money with Flattr.
SyneRyder 9y ago
There's Google Contributor, which is trying to make another comeback. One of the newspapers in Australia is using it, and supposedly Business Insider as well. https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/
- gwern 9y ago
  I've looked at Contributor and found it weirdly limited. Google doesn't need publishers to sign up for Contributor, because they are already all signed up for AdSense! The most logical way to implement Contributor would be essentially as a personal buyout of AdSense ads: if you are a Contributor, the AdSense JS checks that and then simply doesn't run, and assigns a fraction of a cent to the publisher in lieu of a displayed ad. Everyone gets what they want and this immediately gets you coverage of millions of websites instead of, like, 10.
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    That's how the original Google Contributor actually worked, it would remove Adsense ads from all websites running AdSense. You could even choose what to replace them with (eg pictures of kittens). Matt Cutts posted about it here in 2015: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-contributor/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-contributor/ Apparently that model was a huge flop and people just didn't want it. The new version requires publishers to remove all ads (not just AdSense), which helps since many newspapers seem to have dropped AdSense & switched to Taboola & other ad networks. Which might be one reason Google is trying it again. (I expect the new Contributor will fail too, though. I think the majority of people just don't want to pay for online content.)
    - gwern 9y ago
      That's a pity. I expect the new optin model to work much worse; not sure why they're bothering... Patreon, IMO, shows people are willing to pay for online content but the exact method and experience matters a lot.

spc476 9y ago

Up until a week ago, I had an Amazon banner on my blog. When I set it up (about a decade ago), you had the ability to specify a search term in the URL of the banner, and I used this. For each post, I would have a targeted search term to use to display the Amazon banner. Sometime in the past month or two Amazon got rid of that feature and so I was only getting a generic Amazon sales banner. I'm not sure why they changed, but they did, and I removed the banner. Thanks Amazon.

zerocrates 9y ago
They probably determined your page-relevant term was just getting in the way of their killer machine-learning tuned strategy of showing ads for the last thing the user happened to look at.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- colechristensen 9y ago
  Or better, slight variations on the most recent purchase
- spc476 9y ago
  If it was a banner of products related to previous purchases, okay, I can see that. But the banner was just a generic "Shop at Amazon!" Lame.
  - yeldarb 9y ago
    Do you use Ghostery or other “do not track” tools? It’s possible your users were seeing something different
    - spc476 9y ago
      Nope. I have no ad blockers installed. I also checked the Amazon affiliate website and the new banner ads (at the size I wanted) no longer have the option I was used to.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Antrikshy 9y ago

How do you have experience running hundreds of forums? :O

jefozabuss 9y ago
Step 1: Run hundreds of forums
buro9 9y ago
I've been running forums since 1996 using almost every major forum software that has existed. I'm currently running my own software (which we tried and failed to commercialise), and the largest forum I run is https://www.lfgss.com/ https://www.lfgss.com/ with 250k monthly unique visitors, but the long tail is very long. We actually now survive more on donations from forum users than any advertising. About 2/3 revenue is donations, 1/3 from affiliates. Affiliates work really well, but the rise of cash back sites mean that the revenue per sale is dropping. Affiliates work well for delivering new customers, but cash back is leading to retailers paying out for retaining customers which means the cost is shifting from acquisition to retention, which is traditionally where they make their profit. Hence cash back is leading retailers to make the terms far more strict, shorter cookie periods, lower %, etc. Donations have been the saviour. As I'm running the sites as a platform, the larger sites effectively subsidise the young and growing sites. Also, as a platform: 1 volunteer (me) runs all of the sites. Moderation is by communities, and has proven very effective whilst not requiring any additional cost. Though I did invest in some good lawyers for the T&Cs to make sure that approach kept the platform free of liability from individual sites on the platform.