5 ms·

What is the "economic model" you speak of? It's surely not banner ads, and it's surely not search ads. Also it can't do behavioral targeting. Please educate me

hvidgaard 8y ago
They're "sponsored by", just like some YouTubers do. So if your target audience is significant, you can choose to include something from a sponsor in return for a payment.
- cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
  Do you think that model works for textual content the same way it works for Podcast?
  - hvidgaard 8y ago
    If they use ad networks I can block it, but inline and serve from their own servers and I cannot. Maybe it'll work, maybe it will not, but I'm inclined to believe it will to the same extend advertising works in newspapers and magazines.
    - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
      Well, it is a fact that it doesn't work. I'm not making this up. The whole industry knows it doesn't work. This type of advertising has a name of its own: "native advertising". Companies like Buzzfeed, etc. made a lot of money in the beginning by taking advantage of this new format, essentially tricking readers into thinking that these are actual real content. However it doesn't work as well as it used to because people have pretty much figured out what a native ad looks like. However podcasts are single threaded, meaning if you're listening to a podcast and an ad starts playing, you could skip it but most people just keep it on as long as it's not too long. Basically it's a pushed advertising. But this is completely different when it comes to textual content because visual content is easily ignorable AND blockable. Plus, even if you don't block or ignore it, you still only glance at the banner ad, which is completely different from the level of advertising done by podcasters. There are tons more reasons why podcasts and textual media are completely different beasts, but the gist is, content industry is not as simple as it looks. Every ad format has a different value from one another, and also it depends on how focused the audience is, etc.
      - hvidgaard 8y ago
        They work in magazines and newspapers. An article delivered over RSS is basically the same as a magazine delivered in your mailbox. You may glance over it, but as long as it's delivered from the same servers as the actual content it's not blockable. I'm not saying it should be a flashing banner on top, but it be somewhat incorporated in a format and length such that people aren't too annoyed - probably in corporation with the "sponsor". We know this works from the web because advertisers keep paying money for the ad space through articles.
        cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
        They do NOT work in magazines and newspapers. That's why they are going out of business. And that's why all the larger media companies are coming online and ditching offline versions.
        hvidgaard 8y ago
        You're applying causation when there is no clear link. They are going out of business because they're being replaced by online entities. Before The Internet was a thing they worked just fine, again, as evident by the sheer amount of advertising in magazines back then.
- zbentley 8y ago
  I like podcasts, and think we're in something of a golden age for them right now. However, the "sponsorship" model (a very few advertisers paying content creators to--usually manually--include mention of them in their content) is much more concerning to me than the "black box ad auction" model (content creators get money from an advertising aggregator like Google for putting a box on their page). There's a spectrum there, to be sure, but with sponsorship it's much easier for advertisers to explicitly or implicitly influence the content creators outside of the "this podcast funded by FooBarCorp!" segments. Even without strong-arming creators, the knowledge of sponsorship can have a chilling effect on some content (i.e. it's just tawdry to start a segment about military drones being bad and then have to state that Lockheed Martin is your sponsor). This can have two outcomes, neither of them good. Option one is that content creators can spend a lot of time trying to select/vet/court sponsors that align with their interests. This is the NPR model, and even they have trouble getting it right. Smaller creators may not have the time or ability to emulate it. Option two is content that drifts into the realm of affiliate marketing as sponsors exert more influence over creators. Neither of those have happened yet because the market is not yet saturated, I suspect. I'd prefer black-box auctioned ads over that any day, even with the drawbacks of that system (ad aggregator influence, pervasive tracking, content delivery engineered for metrics collection, potential for sketchy ads to run on your site).
  - fenwick67 8y ago
    black-box auction ads aren't as ideal as you might think - lots of brands put pressure on YouTube recently to change their monetization policies to exclude certain types of content.

hvidgaard 8y ago

They're "sponsored by", just like some YouTubers do. So if your target audience is significant, you can choose to include something from a sponsor in return for a payment.

cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
Do you think that model works for textual content the same way it works for Podcast?
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  If they use ad networks I can block it, but inline and serve from their own servers and I cannot. Maybe it'll work, maybe it will not, but I'm inclined to believe it will to the same extend advertising works in newspapers and magazines.
  - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
    Well, it is a fact that it doesn't work. I'm not making this up. The whole industry knows it doesn't work. This type of advertising has a name of its own: "native advertising". Companies like Buzzfeed, etc. made a lot of money in the beginning by taking advantage of this new format, essentially tricking readers into thinking that these are actual real content. However it doesn't work as well as it used to because people have pretty much figured out what a native ad looks like. However podcasts are single threaded, meaning if you're listening to a podcast and an ad starts playing, you could skip it but most people just keep it on as long as it's not too long. Basically it's a pushed advertising. But this is completely different when it comes to textual content because visual content is easily ignorable AND blockable. Plus, even if you don't block or ignore it, you still only glance at the banner ad, which is completely different from the level of advertising done by podcasters. There are tons more reasons why podcasts and textual media are completely different beasts, but the gist is, content industry is not as simple as it looks. Every ad format has a different value from one another, and also it depends on how focused the audience is, etc.
    - hvidgaard 8y ago
      They work in magazines and newspapers. An article delivered over RSS is basically the same as a magazine delivered in your mailbox. You may glance over it, but as long as it's delivered from the same servers as the actual content it's not blockable. I'm not saying it should be a flashing banner on top, but it be somewhat incorporated in a format and length such that people aren't too annoyed - probably in corporation with the "sponsor". We know this works from the web because advertisers keep paying money for the ad space through articles.
      - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
        They do NOT work in magazines and newspapers. That's why they are going out of business. And that's why all the larger media companies are coming online and ditching offline versions.
        hvidgaard 8y ago
        You're applying causation when there is no clear link. They are going out of business because they're being replaced by online entities. Before The Internet was a thing they worked just fine, again, as evident by the sheer amount of advertising in magazines back then.
zbentley 8y ago
I like podcasts, and think we're in something of a golden age for them right now. However, the "sponsorship" model (a very few advertisers paying content creators to--usually manually--include mention of them in their content) is much more concerning to me than the "black box ad auction" model (content creators get money from an advertising aggregator like Google for putting a box on their page). There's a spectrum there, to be sure, but with sponsorship it's much easier for advertisers to explicitly or implicitly influence the content creators outside of the "this podcast funded by FooBarCorp!" segments. Even without strong-arming creators, the knowledge of sponsorship can have a chilling effect on some content (i.e. it's just tawdry to start a segment about military drones being bad and then have to state that Lockheed Martin is your sponsor). This can have two outcomes, neither of them good. Option one is that content creators can spend a lot of time trying to select/vet/court sponsors that align with their interests. This is the NPR model, and even they have trouble getting it right. Smaller creators may not have the time or ability to emulate it. Option two is content that drifts into the realm of affiliate marketing as sponsors exert more influence over creators. Neither of those have happened yet because the market is not yet saturated, I suspect. I'd prefer black-box auctioned ads over that any day, even with the drawbacks of that system (ad aggregator influence, pervasive tracking, content delivery engineered for metrics collection, potential for sketchy ads to run on your site).
- fenwick67 8y ago
  black-box auction ads aren't as ideal as you might think - lots of brands put pressure on YouTube recently to change their monetization policies to exclude certain types of content.