5 ms·

How hard is it to sell a fixed <img /> tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published

by 627467 8y ago

How hard is it to sell a fixed <img /> tag or any block of text within an article? Sell it as "this content will stay there for as long as the page is published". The problem is that every major publisher has bought into centralized ad brokers. Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. This is what is killing the business: content creators stopped caring about their audience.

rodorgas 8y ago
Companies simply get better leads with tracking. You don’t really know about your audience when you are online, because there are so much traffic and so many users.
- 627467 8y ago
  I heard and even understand the truth in that argument, it even worked well in the past 10 years. But I think the content business has reached a point where it needs a new solutions. Paywalling is only one of them.
juliangoldsmith 8y ago
>Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader is interested in, say, cooking. Facebook and Google know most everything the reader is interested in, and what sort of ads the reader actually interacts with. They can use all of that information to maximize the chance the reader will click on an ad. The problem now is that because of how effective Google' and Facebook's ads are, a single click on an ad is basically worthless. Someone who's trying to sell a product isn't going to pay 100 times as much per click to use a smaller ad network, they're going to go with whoever can give them the most impact.
- lakechfoma 8y ago
  Is there research on how effective the Google/FB model is compared to content based? I wonder if fine grained tracking is even all that more powerful. Regardless, there must be diminishing returns and I wouldn't be surprised if we're there now.
- 627467 8y ago
  I'd like to push back on "Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator". This is the idea that has powered online businesses in the last 10 years, but I'd argue that just because conceptually Google can know me better than NYTimes the raise in ad blockers has shown that the ad distribution ecosystem doesn't really know their users that well. I must be living in a very different world from the one where "Google and Facebook ads are so effective" that no other strategy is possible.
  - juliangoldsmith 8y ago
    I wouldn't attribute a rise in the use of ad blockers to Google or Facebook. It's more of a reaction to intrusive ads, the sort where a video expands to cover the content you're trying to view. Most people (that is, average users, rather than technologically-inclined ones) don't care that much about tracking. As far as Google and Facebook pushing other advertising networks out of business, it's not that they're so effective that no other strategy is possible. It's more that they're effective enough, and so cheap that other networks can't compete.
- amluto 8y ago
  Why do you think this increases as value? Back before targeted advertising, if I saw an ad for a kitchen gizmo on a reputable publication, I would know that the maker of the gizmo was serious and cared about the publication. Now the the ads are targeted, all I know is that the maker paid a shady ad network a couple bucks and I got caught up in their profile.
  - juliangoldsmith 8y ago
    Value hasn't really increased here; in fact, I'd say that ads now are a lot worse in quality than they used to be. The difference with targeted ads is only that users are more likely to click on them. It's driven the cost per click down, and made advertising dirt cheap. In the old model of advertising, the gizmo maker put out an ad in a reputable publication, spending quite a bit of money to do so, and got a small number of high-quality leads. With targeted advertising, the gizmo maker blasts their ad out everywhere, and, for a small amount of money, gets a large number of medium-quality leads. Overall, I'd expect they'd get more sales with the targeted advertising, simply due to casting a wider net.
sveme 8y ago
Natural Language Processing could definitely allow for some context-dependent ads within an article. When reading something on the new C# 7, I'm most likely not interested in some tupperware I decided not to buy on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, but I might be interested in a couple of books on C# and might find these ads acceptable. Don't track me, track and machine learn content people consume.
- pas 8y ago
  > track and machine learn content people consume. It's being done. The whole recommendation systems market/community is growing at an enormous rate. There are a few basic types: - new user (no cookie/session), lands on the main page: show the most popular stuff - new user, lands on a concrete product page: item to item recommendation (others who bought this also bought this) - user with active session: try to match to previous sessions, try to figure out what's next for this session (and optimize for time spent on site, or total cart value, or max clicks, or who knows) And of course there are simple text based algorithms, like a full text search engine combined with scoring/ranking, and then there's the new fancy DNN stuff, and matrix factorization in between.
wvenable 8y ago
> How hard is it to sell a fixed <img /> tag or any block of text within an article? Ad blockers will block that as well. Ad blockers will even block regular old HTML text on the page if it looks like an ad.
- JepZ 8y ago
  How does an ad look like?
  - wvenable 8y ago
    Ad blockers will block images that are standard banner ad size. Maybe a text ad has "ad" somewhere in it's in CSS. We do only internally hosted ads and non-JS text sidebar ads and they're happily blocked by all major ad blockers. Doing everything "right" is no defense. I'm not saying you can't make ads completely indistinguishable from content but I also don't think that's the solution that we want either.
    - JepZ 8y ago
      Thanks :-) I didn't know they also look for common banner sizes.
    - pas 8y ago
      Some people just don't want ads. Paradoxically, the sites I care most about are the ones I want to periodically visit, and enjoy without the ads. So the ad blocker will have filters fine tuned for those. Is that a sustainable business model? Well, no. There's a direct donation on sites nowadays luckily.
  - ihsw2 8y ago
    CSS classes and IDs match certain criteria, like being prefixed with "ad" or suffixed with "banner" and having a rendered size that matches an ad box (eg: 600px by 100px).
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    The ad blocklists are maintained by humans so they can block whatever elements that can be matched by the ad blocker's filter rules.
Nyrox 8y ago
This only holds true for publications with a very specific audience though and even then, it's not going to be optimal. Of course if you have a purely tech oriented blog, or even better, one focused on a specific technology, then surely you can get decent results by partnering with one specific advertiser specific to that niche, but as soon as your audience gets more diverse, like the audience of your average run of the mill newspaper would be, you will be loosing out on a ton of ad revenue if you don't try to target your ads. So while this is a cute idea, I doubt it is practical for any publication of noteworthy size.
- 627467 8y ago
  I don't know whether it is practical or not, my argument is: knowing your audience is a crucial point of the content business (specially if it's "free"). If I'm a writer, a publisher, etc I need to know my audience. Outsourcing ads to third-party means I don't care (enough) about my audience.
smoe 8y ago
I used to work in the marketing department for a big news site in Switzerland some years ago. I wasn't involved much in normal ads, but building interactive campaigns, contests and such. What you say is being done. Mostly in form of "native advertising" these days. But those articles tend to be written with virality in mind, not necessarily usefulness. In my opinion, most of the worst ads come from remnant space advertisement. A middle to upper management person discovers some unused white space while browsing the site and asks the marketing department to fill with something that makes money. Repeat until the site is completely plastered. But because those ads bring in so little in isolation, it is not worth it to have your own sales people trying to sell them. That is why they get outsourced. The publishers I met back then, did not like Google/Facebook, because it their opinion they took to big a cut. But it is either that, or not monetizing the space at all. Another big problem is, the advertisement agencies developers who build the things to be included in websites, tend to be junior/intern level under massive time pressure. Practically no QA and little to no thought put into consequences by any of the involved parties.

by 627467 8y ago

rodorgas 8y ago

Companies simply get better leads with tracking. You don’t really know about your audience when you are online, because there are so much traffic and so many users.

627467 8y ago
I heard and even understand the truth in that argument, it even worked well in the past 10 years. But I think the content business has reached a point where it needs a new solutions. Paywalling is only one of them.

juliangoldsmith 8y ago

>Google and Facebooks of the world sell the idea that they can personalize ads better than content producers and so everyone relies on their trackers and javascripts to build content business online. Publishers should know their audience better than ad servers. Part of the problem is that Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator. A content creator only knows that the reader is interested in, say, cooking. Facebook and Google know most everything the reader is interested in, and what sort of ads the reader actually interacts with. They can use all of that information to maximize the chance the reader will click on an ad. The problem now is that because of how effective Google' and Facebook's ads are, a single click on an ad is basically worthless. Someone who's trying to sell a product isn't going to pay 100 times as much per click to use a smaller ad network, they're going to go with whoever can give them the most impact.

lakechfoma 8y ago
Is there research on how effective the Google/FB model is compared to content based? I wonder if fine grained tracking is even all that more powerful. Regardless, there must be diminishing returns and I wouldn't be surprised if we're there now.
627467 8y ago
I'd like to push back on "Google and Facebook actually can know the audience better than the content creator". This is the idea that has powered online businesses in the last 10 years, but I'd argue that just because conceptually Google can know me better than NYTimes the raise in ad blockers has shown that the ad distribution ecosystem doesn't really know their users that well. I must be living in a very different world from the one where "Google and Facebook ads are so effective" that no other strategy is possible.
- juliangoldsmith 8y ago
  I wouldn't attribute a rise in the use of ad blockers to Google or Facebook. It's more of a reaction to intrusive ads, the sort where a video expands to cover the content you're trying to view. Most people (that is, average users, rather than technologically-inclined ones) don't care that much about tracking. As far as Google and Facebook pushing other advertising networks out of business, it's not that they're so effective that no other strategy is possible. It's more that they're effective enough, and so cheap that other networks can't compete.
amluto 8y ago
Why do you think this increases as value? Back before targeted advertising, if I saw an ad for a kitchen gizmo on a reputable publication, I would know that the maker of the gizmo was serious and cared about the publication. Now the the ads are targeted, all I know is that the maker paid a shady ad network a couple bucks and I got caught up in their profile.
- juliangoldsmith 8y ago
  Value hasn't really increased here; in fact, I'd say that ads now are a lot worse in quality than they used to be. The difference with targeted ads is only that users are more likely to click on them. It's driven the cost per click down, and made advertising dirt cheap. In the old model of advertising, the gizmo maker put out an ad in a reputable publication, spending quite a bit of money to do so, and got a small number of high-quality leads. With targeted advertising, the gizmo maker blasts their ad out everywhere, and, for a small amount of money, gets a large number of medium-quality leads. Overall, I'd expect they'd get more sales with the targeted advertising, simply due to casting a wider net.

sveme 8y ago

Natural Language Processing could definitely allow for some context-dependent ads within an article. When reading something on the new C# 7, I'm most likely not interested in some tupperware I decided not to buy on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, but I might be interested in a couple of books on C# and might find these ads acceptable. Don't track me, track and machine learn content people consume.

pas 8y ago
> track and machine learn content people consume. It's being done. The whole recommendation systems market/community is growing at an enormous rate. There are a few basic types: - new user (no cookie/session), lands on the main page: show the most popular stuff - new user, lands on a concrete product page: item to item recommendation (others who bought this also bought this) - user with active session: try to match to previous sessions, try to figure out what's next for this session (and optimize for time spent on site, or total cart value, or max clicks, or who knows) And of course there are simple text based algorithms, like a full text search engine combined with scoring/ranking, and then there's the new fancy DNN stuff, and matrix factorization in between.

wvenable 8y ago

> How hard is it to sell a fixed <img /> tag or any block of text within an article? Ad blockers will block that as well. Ad blockers will even block regular old HTML text on the page if it looks like an ad.

JepZ 8y ago
How does an ad look like?
- wvenable 8y ago
  Ad blockers will block images that are standard banner ad size. Maybe a text ad has "ad" somewhere in it's in CSS. We do only internally hosted ads and non-JS text sidebar ads and they're happily blocked by all major ad blockers. Doing everything "right" is no defense. I'm not saying you can't make ads completely indistinguishable from content but I also don't think that's the solution that we want either.
  - JepZ 8y ago
    Thanks :-) I didn't know they also look for common banner sizes.
  - pas 8y ago
    Some people just don't want ads. Paradoxically, the sites I care most about are the ones I want to periodically visit, and enjoy without the ads. So the ad blocker will have filters fine tuned for those. Is that a sustainable business model? Well, no. There's a direct donation on sites nowadays luckily.
- ihsw2 8y ago
  CSS classes and IDs match certain criteria, like being prefixed with "ad" or suffixed with "banner" and having a rendered size that matches an ad box (eg: 600px by 100px).
- cpeterso 8y ago
  The ad blocklists are maintained by humans so they can block whatever elements that can be matched by the ad blocker's filter rules.

Nyrox 8y ago

This only holds true for publications with a very specific audience though and even then, it's not going to be optimal. Of course if you have a purely tech oriented blog, or even better, one focused on a specific technology, then surely you can get decent results by partnering with one specific advertiser specific to that niche, but as soon as your audience gets more diverse, like the audience of your average run of the mill newspaper would be, you will be loosing out on a ton of ad revenue if you don't try to target your ads. So while this is a cute idea, I doubt it is practical for any publication of noteworthy size.

627467 8y ago
I don't know whether it is practical or not, my argument is: knowing your audience is a crucial point of the content business (specially if it's "free"). If I'm a writer, a publisher, etc I need to know my audience. Outsourcing ads to third-party means I don't care (enough) about my audience.

smoe 8y ago

I used to work in the marketing department for a big news site in Switzerland some years ago. I wasn't involved much in normal ads, but building interactive campaigns, contests and such. What you say is being done. Mostly in form of "native advertising" these days. But those articles tend to be written with virality in mind, not necessarily usefulness. In my opinion, most of the worst ads come from remnant space advertisement. A middle to upper management person discovers some unused white space while browsing the site and asks the marketing department to fill with something that makes money. Repeat until the site is completely plastered. But because those ads bring in so little in isolation, it is not worth it to have your own sales people trying to sell them. That is why they get outsourced. The publishers I met back then, did not like Google/Facebook, because it their opinion they took to big a cut. But it is either that, or not monetizing the space at all. Another big problem is, the advertisement agencies developers who build the things to be included in websites, tend to be junior/intern level under massive time pressure. Practically no QA and little to no thought put into consequences by any of the involved parties.