4 ms·

I don't understand. What stands in the way of a small niche website for, say, dog owners to sell ad space for dog related products without having some kind of d

I don't understand. What stands in the way of a small niche website for, say, dog owners to sell ad space for dog related products without having some kind of data hoarding ad tech behind it?

manigandham 8y ago
Because advertisers don't want to deal with a bunch of smaller sites. That's why ad networks and exchanges exist, so you can buy a single impression for the right user wherever they are across the web. Take away the fine-grained targeting and you end up with big blind campaigns running on a few large sites with the biggest reach. This is the way TV and radio work, wasteful and expensive but great for the channels that get them.
- mook 8y ago
  Why can't middlemen still exist, just without the individual targeting? Can't sites still self-report their categories (so that, say, a dog grooming site would say they should get dog ads)?
  - manigandham 8y ago
    They can and they do, that's what ad networks are. There are plenty of ways to group sites by category and readership without individual targeting but middlemen add percentage costs to the ad spend which the industry has been slowly pushing out. The bigger issue is that fine-grained targeting is still wanted so if you remove 3rd-party tracking then advertisers will go towards the biggest sites that can supply it via their own 1st-party tracking. Even then it's still hard to work with many vendors so even more of the money is now going to Google and Facebook who can just do it all with better data than anyone else.
- JAlexoid 8y ago
  Fine grained targeting is a myth.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    It's definitely real and used for hundreds of billions in annual ad spend. Perhaps you're referring to effectiveness, in which case that's dependent on thousands of factors.
olegious 8y ago
The small niche site doesn't have the resources to direct sell to these advertisers. Also, for most advertisers it is far more convenient to go to a player that can sell them many of these niche sites bundled together on a single order form.
sbuttgereit 8y ago
If I were buying ads (I've made some micro purchases in the past), I'd also understand that the users of the small, niche website are also likely using the larger websites, too. So the time in researching what small websites exist for my market (say dog owners), the ad cost per buy of making many small buys, the administrative overhead related to maintaining many small accounts (accounting, dealing with many sales people, many platforms to administer, etc) vs. buying ads in greater bulk with a few content providers like the NYT or others alongside pet related stories (or other compatible content) where I'm likely to get most of the niche site users and others that are also in my market that don't use those sites.... seems kinda no-brainer. I also expect data aggregation to continue, even without a focus on "personalized" or "one-to-one" behavioral data. For example the NYT times would likely want to be able to show advertisers that those that read dog articles also disproportionately read articles about outdoors activities... they can produce those metrics within the course of normal operations, I would think, possible even without employing things like cookies for the purpose... naturally the metrics being captured today do have a market value beyond just allowing the collector what ads to show and my suggestion doesn't replace that path, but I expect for just the purpose of targeting ads that's probably more useful anyway.
Mirioron 8y ago
Time. Would you rather deal with one website that gets a billion hits or 1000 websites that get 1 million hits each? Negotiating deals, verifying them and all that stuff costs time and money.

I don't understand. What stands in the way of a small niche website for, say, dog owners to sell ad space for dog related products without having some kind of data hoarding ad tech behind it?

manigandham 8y ago

Because advertisers don't want to deal with a bunch of smaller sites. That's why ad networks and exchanges exist, so you can buy a single impression for the right user wherever they are across the web. Take away the fine-grained targeting and you end up with big blind campaigns running on a few large sites with the biggest reach. This is the way TV and radio work, wasteful and expensive but great for the channels that get them.

mook 8y ago
Why can't middlemen still exist, just without the individual targeting? Can't sites still self-report their categories (so that, say, a dog grooming site would say they should get dog ads)?
- manigandham 8y ago
  They can and they do, that's what ad networks are. There are plenty of ways to group sites by category and readership without individual targeting but middlemen add percentage costs to the ad spend which the industry has been slowly pushing out. The bigger issue is that fine-grained targeting is still wanted so if you remove 3rd-party tracking then advertisers will go towards the biggest sites that can supply it via their own 1st-party tracking. Even then it's still hard to work with many vendors so even more of the money is now going to Google and Facebook who can just do it all with better data than anyone else.
JAlexoid 8y ago
Fine grained targeting is a myth.
- manigandham 8y ago
  It's definitely real and used for hundreds of billions in annual ad spend. Perhaps you're referring to effectiveness, in which case that's dependent on thousands of factors.

olegious 8y ago

The small niche site doesn't have the resources to direct sell to these advertisers. Also, for most advertisers it is far more convenient to go to a player that can sell them many of these niche sites bundled together on a single order form.

sbuttgereit 8y ago

If I were buying ads (I've made some micro purchases in the past), I'd also understand that the users of the small, niche website are also likely using the larger websites, too. So the time in researching what small websites exist for my market (say dog owners), the ad cost per buy of making many small buys, the administrative overhead related to maintaining many small accounts (accounting, dealing with many sales people, many platforms to administer, etc) vs. buying ads in greater bulk with a few content providers like the NYT or others alongside pet related stories (or other compatible content) where I'm likely to get most of the niche site users and others that are also in my market that don't use those sites.... seems kinda no-brainer. I also expect data aggregation to continue, even without a focus on "personalized" or "one-to-one" behavioral data. For example the NYT times would likely want to be able to show advertisers that those that read dog articles also disproportionately read articles about outdoors activities... they can produce those metrics within the course of normal operations, I would think, possible even without employing things like cookies for the purpose... naturally the metrics being captured today do have a market value beyond just allowing the collector what ads to show and my suggestion doesn't replace that path, but I expect for just the purpose of targeting ads that's probably more useful anyway.

Mirioron 8y ago

Time. Would you rather deal with one website that gets a billion hits or 1000 websites that get 1 million hits each? Negotiating deals, verifying them and all that stuff costs time and money.