6 ms·

The Great Unwatched

69 points by kjhughes 13y ago

theorique 13y ago
It's an interesting business, where there is little or no demand for the "product" from the person who ultimately consumes it. So you have to figure out ways to trick and/or force the end-consumer to actually consume the product that you have invested so much effort in producing.
- vitd 13y ago
  Yeah, I pretty much immediately close any web page that has an auto play video on it. If I get a link from a friend and a video plays before it, I just close it. No interest in that stuff, especially when I'm browsing at work.
- my_username_is_ 13y ago
  While I agree that most of the ads you see online today are not desired, I would argue that it does not have to be this way. When advertising is done right, it can open consumers up to products that they wouldn't know exist without ads. It actually creates value for both the buyer and the seller. A music news site [0] I tend to visit used to be a shining example of this--ads promoting new records by bands featured on the site could be seen in their banners and fit seemlessly with the rest of the page, now they've been replaced by McDonald's and Dr Pepper across large portions of the site. I've found out about new albums that I may not have otherwise listened to when ads were relevant; now that the site's admin realizes that fast food pays more than indie record labels I'll leave AdBlock enabled. [0] http://www.absolutepunk.net http://www.absolutepunk.net
  - theorique 13y ago
    Agreed, I like watching coming attractions trailers before a movie, or having suggestions turn up in Spotify. However, in the latter case, I've already purchased the product, so the "advertising" is actually an in-product enhancement pointing me at getting more value out of what I've already paid for. I wonder if I would be so interested in the cross-promotions if I had to pay for new tracks or albums every time.
patmcguire 13y ago
"The crux of the problem is that the number of video ads that agencies and brands want to run far exceeds the amount of quality inventory — that is, well-placed video players on prestigious sites, like, say, Nationalgeographic.com. When the premium space fills up, media buyers start looking for video players in less coveted online real estate." Why doesn't the video market clear? Do clients just refuse to pay enough for the good space? Don't tell me they know how much that ad space is worth to them in revenue. I worked at an adtech startup for two years --- we only barely touched on video, but the dynamics are still there. Buyers plan on the scale of D-Day but there's really no place to do that --- there's no halftime superbowl ad on the internet, just a billion little things that have slightly different definitions of every single thing involved. What's an inch when screens are different sizes and the site has responsive design? What if you've got something built around 4:3 or 16:9 and their site is the opposite? What counts as adult, exactly? Bet it isn't the same in Northbrook IL as it in Palo Alto). It's a big mess, and the things that put buyers' minds at ease aren't the same that make them money.
- hagbardgroup 13y ago
  The problem is that it's not in the organizational mindset of agencies that mostly do creative work and expect to be able to hand it over to another company that specializes in buying media space. You can see the ad networks as opportunistic parasites that take advantage of over-specialization in ad-land. Fancy creatives that have next to no tech knowledge get their budgets gobbled by people with some measure of tech capability and no ethics. The 'outsource everything but your core competency' only works when you can trust everyone that you are outsourcing to. The lack of quality inventory is also something of a canard. Direct buying and selling requires ::effort::, thinking, spending on expertise, and salespeople. Dumping ads into a network that quotes absurd numbers and promises everything requires pressing a button and going to get coffee. It's like the Somali pirates -- they identified a bunch of ships that had no defenses and corporations that would barf out millions of dollars when you point guns at a few sailors. A $500 weapons budget could hold a multi-billion dollar cargo hostage. It's similar with ad piracy.
  - flomo 13y ago
hagbardgroup 13y ago
Why is this agency buying through a network instead of doing it themselves? They could just do managed placements rather than just tossing it to a network who does the same thing with less of a direct incentive to serve the client. The networks lack skin in the game and have an incentive to play the hear no evil speak no evil see no evil charade. This is part of the reason why a lot of online media is such trash. Ad budgets are getting siphoned off by fraud at scale. If the internet's entire purpose is to connect people with the information that they need as quickly as possible, then this purpose is being circumvented. Instead they are getting junk masquerading as information. The Daily Caller quote is also a canard. They get paid junk rates because they are offering junk space and have junk site performance and a broken mobile website. Media companies would treat it as serious if their papers printed incorrectly half the time or the signal turned to static or had odd color hue on TV. On the web shoddy workmanship is considered acceptable. The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople.
- morgante 13y ago
  > The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople. It's very hard to sell directly. You have to have significant scale for advertisers to even be interested in talking to you, and even if you reach that scale it requires a whole sales staff and tech support which, frankly, most (digital) publishers just don't have.
  - hagbardgroup 13y ago
    Hard? Sure. Scale? Not as much as you think. Local newspapers all over the country somehow manage to hit $10 cpm for direct sales. I don't dispute that having a sales team isn't hard or potentially expensive. One of the reason why digital is such a laggard in a lot of markets is because of the fraud sapping budgets.
nl 13y ago
Remember when people said Google paid too much for Youtube? Pretty soon it will look like the bargain of the century.
- wutbrodo 13y ago
  It pretty much has already, for a couple of years (particularly in the context of recent comparably sized purchases like whatsapp) Edit: I was thinking of instagram, whatsapp was about 15x as expensive as YouTube.
doxology 13y ago
I'm seeing a lot of NY Times articles on HN lately, and it's pretty lame stuff too. Is it my imagination or is HN and NYT in cahoots?
coldcode 13y ago
I despise sites that not only auto-run ads but have multiple ones on the same page that auto-run together. Of course they probably have no idea since the ads come from somewhere else from somewhere else from somewhere else.
- rwmj 13y ago
  I've never seen them. In fact the biggest surprise of this article is that video adverts exist. Using NoScript + youtube-dl, and not having Flash or an H.264 codec installed, is working well for me.
malchow 13y ago
The NYT's piece on unwatched ads contains not fewer than four below-the-fold <div>s containing display ads from which the paper will likely receive no revenue.

69 points by kjhughes 13y ago

It's an interesting business, where there is little or no demand for the "product" from the person who ultimately consumes it. So you have to figure out ways to trick and/or force the end-consumer to actually consume the product that you have invested so much effort in producing.

vitd 13y ago
Yeah, I pretty much immediately close any web page that has an auto play video on it. If I get a link from a friend and a video plays before it, I just close it. No interest in that stuff, especially when I'm browsing at work.
my_username_is_ 13y ago
While I agree that most of the ads you see online today are not desired, I would argue that it does not have to be this way. When advertising is done right, it can open consumers up to products that they wouldn't know exist without ads. It actually creates value for both the buyer and the seller. A music news site [0] I tend to visit used to be a shining example of this--ads promoting new records by bands featured on the site could be seen in their banners and fit seemlessly with the rest of the page, now they've been replaced by McDonald's and Dr Pepper across large portions of the site. I've found out about new albums that I may not have otherwise listened to when ads were relevant; now that the site's admin realizes that fast food pays more than indie record labels I'll leave AdBlock enabled. [0] http://www.absolutepunk.net http://www.absolutepunk.net
- theorique 13y ago
  Agreed, I like watching coming attractions trailers before a movie, or having suggestions turn up in Spotify. However, in the latter case, I've already purchased the product, so the "advertising" is actually an in-product enhancement pointing me at getting more value out of what I've already paid for. I wonder if I would be so interested in the cross-promotions if I had to pay for new tracks or albums every time.

patmcguire 13y ago

"The crux of the problem is that the number of video ads that agencies and brands want to run far exceeds the amount of quality inventory — that is, well-placed video players on prestigious sites, like, say, Nationalgeographic.com. When the premium space fills up, media buyers start looking for video players in less coveted online real estate." Why doesn't the video market clear? Do clients just refuse to pay enough for the good space? Don't tell me they know how much that ad space is worth to them in revenue. I worked at an adtech startup for two years --- we only barely touched on video, but the dynamics are still there. Buyers plan on the scale of D-Day but there's really no place to do that --- there's no halftime superbowl ad on the internet, just a billion little things that have slightly different definitions of every single thing involved. What's an inch when screens are different sizes and the site has responsive design? What if you've got something built around 4:3 or 16:9 and their site is the opposite? What counts as adult, exactly? Bet it isn't the same in Northbrook IL as it in Palo Alto). It's a big mess, and the things that put buyers' minds at ease aren't the same that make them money.

hagbardgroup 13y ago
The problem is that it's not in the organizational mindset of agencies that mostly do creative work and expect to be able to hand it over to another company that specializes in buying media space. You can see the ad networks as opportunistic parasites that take advantage of over-specialization in ad-land. Fancy creatives that have next to no tech knowledge get their budgets gobbled by people with some measure of tech capability and no ethics. The 'outsource everything but your core competency' only works when you can trust everyone that you are outsourcing to. The lack of quality inventory is also something of a canard. Direct buying and selling requires ::effort::, thinking, spending on expertise, and salespeople. Dumping ads into a network that quotes absurd numbers and promises everything requires pressing a button and going to get coffee. It's like the Somali pirates -- they identified a bunch of ships that had no defenses and corporations that would barf out millions of dollars when you point guns at a few sailors. A $500 weapons budget could hold a multi-billion dollar cargo hostage. It's similar with ad piracy.
- flomo 13y ago

hagbardgroup 13y ago

Why is this agency buying through a network instead of doing it themselves? They could just do managed placements rather than just tossing it to a network who does the same thing with less of a direct incentive to serve the client. The networks lack skin in the game and have an incentive to play the hear no evil speak no evil see no evil charade. This is part of the reason why a lot of online media is such trash. Ad budgets are getting siphoned off by fraud at scale. If the internet's entire purpose is to connect people with the information that they need as quickly as possible, then this purpose is being circumvented. Instead they are getting junk masquerading as information. The Daily Caller quote is also a canard. They get paid junk rates because they are offering junk space and have junk site performance and a broken mobile website. Media companies would treat it as serious if their papers printed incorrectly half the time or the signal turned to static or had odd color hue on TV. On the web shoddy workmanship is considered acceptable. The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople.

morgante 13y ago
> The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople. It's very hard to sell directly. You have to have significant scale for advertisers to even be interested in talking to you, and even if you reach that scale it requires a whole sales staff and tech support which, frankly, most (digital) publishers just don't have.
- hagbardgroup 13y ago
  Hard? Sure. Scale? Not as much as you think. Local newspapers all over the country somehow manage to hit $10 cpm for direct sales. I don't dispute that having a sales team isn't hard or potentially expensive. One of the reason why digital is such a laggard in a lot of markets is because of the fraud sapping budgets.

nl 13y ago

Remember when people said Google paid too much for Youtube? Pretty soon it will look like the bargain of the century.

wutbrodo 13y ago
It pretty much has already, for a couple of years (particularly in the context of recent comparably sized purchases like whatsapp) Edit: I was thinking of instagram, whatsapp was about 15x as expensive as YouTube.

doxology 13y ago

I'm seeing a lot of NY Times articles on HN lately, and it's pretty lame stuff too. Is it my imagination or is HN and NYT in cahoots?

coldcode 13y ago

I despise sites that not only auto-run ads but have multiple ones on the same page that auto-run together. Of course they probably have no idea since the ads come from somewhere else from somewhere else from somewhere else.

rwmj 13y ago
I've never seen them. In fact the biggest surprise of this article is that video adverts exist. Using NoScript + youtube-dl, and not having Flash or an H.264 codec installed, is working well for me.

malchow 13y ago

The NYT's piece on unwatched ads contains not fewer than four below-the-fold <div>s containing display ads from which the paper will likely receive no revenue.