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During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. You can verify this by counting the number of times yo

During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. You can verify this by counting the number of times you've bought anything by clicking on an ad you saw on a website. Most people I've asked say 0, 1, or 2 items, with a heavy skew towards zero. For publications in markets with a large number of vendors, the pool of vendors who still see advantage in web ads (such as ads that don't expect purchases, say, as for an upcoming movie) will sustain them. But the software development tools market is small with fewer than 100 vendors, many of which don't advertise at all. So, essentially, there just was not enough advertising to keep us going.

otoburb 12y ago
How much would you need keep an operation like Dr. Dobb's alive, or to setup a similar type of operation? I have no experience around content generation or media management, so am curious if figures could be shared around the cost structure.
- andrewbinstock 12y ago
  Alas, I can't share that information with you WRT Dr. Dobb's, much as I'd like to.
  - otoburb 12y ago
    I figured as much, but never hurts to ask :) Thanks very much!
hnriot 12y ago
advertising does more than sell things directly, brand recognition is another big purpose.
- andrewbinstock 12y ago
  True. However, brand recognition ads occur more in the consumer space than in technical market. Especially in a market of mostly small vendors, they're trying to sell, rather than establish a perception of the brand.
  - textfiles 12y ago
    I love your market research "I asked a few people." Binstock, you are the dictionary definition of "ignominious end".
  - petercooper 12y ago
    I'm not sure why DDJ should be limited to software tools vendors as its core of advertisers. There are hundreds of companies with solid budgets who want to get in front of developers in general to influence technology choices and purchase decisions - especially in the SaaS, platforms, infrastructure and cloud spaces. I don't think the problem is yours, editorially, but being a little blunter than I like to be.. I wonder if the right company owns DDJ, because this is as much as a gold rush period as any other and DDJ remains in the upper echelons of its niche. (Disclaimer: I sell advertising of this nature on developer related properties.)
Joky 12y ago
At the same time, I don't buy a coke by clicking on the ad' when it airs on TV... The impact of commercial is beyond the simple immediate relation "click & buy".
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  Yes, but with so many alternative online advertising vehicles that can be measured more precisely, or that can be attributed to purchase in a shorter and more direct cycle, website display advertising gets deprioritized in media plans. There's a very real value to awareness campaigns, but awareness campaigns are out of fashion at the moment. It's all about attribution and measurable response right now. The pendulum has swung too far in that direction, if you ask me. But it's very hard to argue with numbers you can tool around with and impact directly, or with placements that you can buy into programmatically, and not on fixed sales cycles. Also, no one site or publication -- no matter how valuable its readership niche -- can outcompete the scale and the addressibility of the dozens and dozens of ad networks out there these days. (Or, at least, very few sites are perceived to be able to outcompete networks.) Ad-supported publishing is in an unfortunate and precarious position, as this piece sadly but correctly identifies.
- B-Con 12y ago
  There are different goals of advertising. Brand awareness and purchase oriented (I forget the technical names). Most online advertising has revolved around driving purchases, with brand awareness only establishing even a non-negligible online presence fairly recently. When someone creates the ads the ad almost always focuses on one of those two things. Purchase oriented ads are expected to produce a certain number of actual purchase, have metrics to measure their success, and have one set of techniques. Brand awareness has different metrics and generally takes different means to be successful. My understanding (as an outsider who doesn't work directly in advertising) is that failed purchase-oriented ads are not viewed as successful brand awareness ads. If they wanted brand awareness they'd do a separate ad campaign that targets that specifically and would do a better job. So if a purchase ad fails to drive purchasing, it's still considered a failure.
  - 12y ago
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Andrew, in fairness this is incorrect. Web advertising on content is no more, nor any less, effective than web advertising in a printed magazine. Rather than ask the question "How many of you have clicked on something and bought it." a more relevant question is "How many of you have bought something, or from someone, you have seen as an advertisement on a web page?" Digikey ads showed up on Dr. Dobbs and I've bought a ton of stuff from them. Sometimes reading an article there, will show an ad, and it will remind me of something I was supposed to get. Then I will go over there and buy it. Almost exactly as I did with the magazine version. That said, click fraud has really burned a lot of advertisers. That is why advertising on content needs to shift to a performance based model, ads that let you know that someone went to a site after they saw the ad on your page, and bought it. That should net you a few $. As it stands, advertisers bid for 10,000 clicks at a nickel ($500 ad spend) and compare that to what they sell, and they come up poorly. If they set aside $500 to reward the first 100 people who clicked through and bought something you would find things to be very very different. Click fraud doesn't work if the value isn't in the click. But this migration is currently not happening as quickly as we would like.
- aikah 12y ago
  > That said, click fraud has really burned a lot of advertisers. THIS > That is why advertising on content needs to shift to a performance based model, As someone in the ad biz,it's something hard to do.You still need ways to track(I understand people don't like it but...) accurately where the traffic comes from.We really need innovative tools in that domain! Finally,I think the biggest disappointment in web marketing comes from the (un)ability of social medias to really influence sells.FB and co ad services are way worse than classic web advertising.It's borderline scammy.
  - Donzo 12y ago
    Not picking a fight. This is a serious inquiry. How do you determine whether your budget was wasted on click fraud or just ineffective landing pages? Surely click fraud occurs, but how can you tell?
    - 12y ago
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
> During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. I think that's the wrong conclusion to draw. Advertising on web sites works very, very well and thousands of companies depend on it on a daily basis. What doesn't work so well is advertising on a web site that's just an online version of a magazine. The problem has a lot more to do with the magazine part than the web site aspect. I've been reading DrDobbs for a couple of decades and I'm a fan, but the simple truth is that it's become less relevant these past years. First switching to a download only model and then progressively nagging me pretty aggressively to download my own issue (which I stopped doing because the summaries I saw in the email were of little interest to me). Andrew, reading your editorials has always been a pleasure and you should be proud of what you accomplished.
- andsmi2 12y ago
  There is a bit of a feeling that advertising on web sites, much like SEO, is a bit of snake oil business....I agree with the op's statement-- when have you bought anything from a web advertisement anywhere? Maybe you have signed up for a service from one? But bought something? Even something very targeted.... although it does seem that "paid placement" in search -- (google search advertising) does provide some sales... Dvorak has been calling this out for some time.... advertisers seem to be catching up.
  - Guvante 12y ago
    The value of the advertisement is not just "# of people who click and pay money", it is a very complex thing to analyze.
    - stormbrew 12y ago
      I think the irony is that the ability to see a path from view->CTR->action has severely devalued online advertising even though the theory behind it is no different from other, less introspectable forms of advertising. In other forms of advertising, the advertisor is forced to confront the fact that the connection between advertising and purchasing is not a direct process because they can't see it anyways. They can see that they advertise and somewhere down the line they can observe a general rise in sales or brand knowledge, but they can almost never tie that to even a campaign, let alone a particular impression. So you have this market for advertising where the advertisers can point to abysmal CTRs and say "See? I shouldn't be paying this much for such terrible action!" while still reaping the benefits of less tangible brand recognition down the road. And thus is born a race to the bottom.
astrodust 12y ago
I've never clicked on a TV commercial, I've never clicked on a magazine, and yet both do influence purchasing behaviour. Would you say that the online marketing fixation on hard metrics, like click-throughs, conversion rates, and page views have poisoned the well here? The engagement metrics for print and television are far softer because the complete data isn't available, they have to extrapolate from samples. I'm surprised that sponsorship isn't more of a thing. The rise of crowd-funded projects should be studied to see if a similar thing can't be done for magazines like this journal except instead of person to creator, more company to company.
aslewofmice 12y ago
Were the ad buys primarily sold direct? Was the site connected to any programmatic ad exchanges in any way? I visit the site and I see the same ad over and over (Interop Convention). Did you have anyone dedicated managing ad operations for the site? We're you selling any of your users data points to third-party data providers?* * For the people who hate the idea of a free content site selling your data, this is a good example of what happens.
- tedbahr 12y ago
  Programmatic Advertising is another way for advertisers to pay virtually nothing. The reason you see Interop over and over again is that this is a house ad - placed by UBM on a UBM site - in lieu of having any paid advertising. We run house ads and banners too - free to us - for our conferences on sdtimes.com Ted Bahr SD Times
  - aslewofmice 12y ago
    But why serve house ads repeatedly when you can tap into programmatic exchange and monetize at least a portion of those impressions? Programmatic doesn't need to be first look on all impressions. If I'm on drdobbs.com in one tab and only being served house ads, but in my second tab I have retargeted ads being served to me, that's lost revenue for drdobbs.com
InclinedPlane 12y ago
I disagree with your conclusion. I am familiar with several sites who have no problem taking in significant ad revenue on content websites. The problem is that you can't just dump random ads on a site and expect that to work, it takes a lot of effort. The best ads tends to be curated to the point of being recommendations basically, but that may or may not work for every site.
downandout 12y ago
>During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. Adsense seems to do pretty well (~$12 billion/year). It's been dropping a bit, and many individual sites don't do well with it, but some do quite well. Did you guys ever experiment with it and test the earnings? Adsense and networks like it have the benefit of showing retargeted ads, so you can get considerably better CTR's and ad inventory relevant to each individual user than you would get from just showing static IDE maker ads. Closing down an institution like Dr. Dobb's can't be something you're doing lightly, but I cannot believe that there isn't some way to generate revenue from millions of engineers visiting your site every month. There are other tech publications that seem to do quite well.
- GoodIntentions 12y ago
  >Adsense seems to do pretty well (~$12 billion/year). No offense intended, but profitability of the entity selling the advert space does not mean return was generated for advertisers.
- tedbahr 12y ago
  Adsense for publishers worked about 10 years ago. My revenue (sdtimes.com) was about $700/month in 2004-5 or so. Not bad for virtually no work and 100% profit margin. Then $600/mo. Then $400. Then 2-3 years later down to $200/mo - meanwhile we were generating 3x the pageviews! When it got down to $140,mo we said forget it, not worth it. As did many many other publishers. There are trillions more ad venues (pages) to advertise on vs 10 years ago. Digital advertising may have gone way up, but it's way more spread out. Ted Bahr, SD Times, still printing!
smegel 12y ago
You know someone who bought 2 items based on ads they saw on a website? You must keep interesting company.
Animats 12y ago
Anyone likely to read Dr. Dobbs probably has an ad blocker.
- danielweber 12y ago
  How true is this? Sure, they're technically sophisticated, but that narrative could be overwhelmed by: 1. they aren't teenagers 2. they run websites that depend on ad revenue 3. they realize content creators need to get paid
  - derekp7 12y ago
    Truthfully, I've never run an ad blocker before, until over the summer I got extremely fed up with a particular web site that I keep going to out of old habit (slashdot.org). A couple times I left a browser tab on the site, and in the middle of the night some video ads started playing through the computer speakers. And over the summer, I was at the camper on a hotspot connection, and accidentally burned through my entire month's bandwidth allotment because accidentally left their front page open when I went hiking for a few hours. Again, those aggressive video ads. So I installed an ad blocker, which actually made my 3g wifi hotspot usable over the summer. (Yes, I should stop visiting sites that get too annoying with aggressive ads, or I should just selectively block those sites).
    - danielweber 12y ago
      Omg, what the hell kind of dark pattern is it that waits 10 minutes to start playing an audio ad? It's one of those "I bet someone got a nice bonus for that" ideas that destroys user trust: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/922449.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/92244...
      - iSnow 12y ago
        If you serve audio ads on site with text content at all, you are a complete moron. The only thing they'll do is advertise the use of AdBlock.
asdkl234890 12y ago
I am really fascinated that this has only happened in the last 18 months? Why? It seems to have always been true?

otoburb 12y ago

How much would you need keep an operation like Dr. Dobb's alive, or to setup a similar type of operation? I have no experience around content generation or media management, so am curious if figures could be shared around the cost structure.

andrewbinstock 12y ago
Alas, I can't share that information with you WRT Dr. Dobb's, much as I'd like to.
- otoburb 12y ago
  I figured as much, but never hurts to ask :) Thanks very much!

hnriot 12y ago

advertising does more than sell things directly, brand recognition is another big purpose.

andrewbinstock 12y ago
True. However, brand recognition ads occur more in the consumer space than in technical market. Especially in a market of mostly small vendors, they're trying to sell, rather than establish a perception of the brand.
- textfiles 12y ago
  I love your market research "I asked a few people." Binstock, you are the dictionary definition of "ignominious end".
- petercooper 12y ago
  I'm not sure why DDJ should be limited to software tools vendors as its core of advertisers. There are hundreds of companies with solid budgets who want to get in front of developers in general to influence technology choices and purchase decisions - especially in the SaaS, platforms, infrastructure and cloud spaces. I don't think the problem is yours, editorially, but being a little blunter than I like to be.. I wonder if the right company owns DDJ, because this is as much as a gold rush period as any other and DDJ remains in the upper echelons of its niche. (Disclaimer: I sell advertising of this nature on developer related properties.)

Joky 12y ago

At the same time, I don't buy a coke by clicking on the ad' when it airs on TV... The impact of commercial is beyond the simple immediate relation "click & buy".

jonnathanson 12y ago
Yes, but with so many alternative online advertising vehicles that can be measured more precisely, or that can be attributed to purchase in a shorter and more direct cycle, website display advertising gets deprioritized in media plans. There's a very real value to awareness campaigns, but awareness campaigns are out of fashion at the moment. It's all about attribution and measurable response right now. The pendulum has swung too far in that direction, if you ask me. But it's very hard to argue with numbers you can tool around with and impact directly, or with placements that you can buy into programmatically, and not on fixed sales cycles. Also, no one site or publication -- no matter how valuable its readership niche -- can outcompete the scale and the addressibility of the dozens and dozens of ad networks out there these days. (Or, at least, very few sites are perceived to be able to outcompete networks.) Ad-supported publishing is in an unfortunate and precarious position, as this piece sadly but correctly identifies.
B-Con 12y ago
There are different goals of advertising. Brand awareness and purchase oriented (I forget the technical names). Most online advertising has revolved around driving purchases, with brand awareness only establishing even a non-negligible online presence fairly recently. When someone creates the ads the ad almost always focuses on one of those two things. Purchase oriented ads are expected to produce a certain number of actual purchase, have metrics to measure their success, and have one set of techniques. Brand awareness has different metrics and generally takes different means to be successful. My understanding (as an outsider who doesn't work directly in advertising) is that failed purchase-oriented ads are not viewed as successful brand awareness ads. If they wanted brand awareness they'd do a separate ad campaign that targets that specifically and would do a better job. So if a purchase ad fails to drive purchasing, it's still considered a failure.
- 12y ago

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Andrew, in fairness this is incorrect. Web advertising on content is no more, nor any less, effective than web advertising in a printed magazine. Rather than ask the question "How many of you have clicked on something and bought it." a more relevant question is "How many of you have bought something, or from someone, you have seen as an advertisement on a web page?" Digikey ads showed up on Dr. Dobbs and I've bought a ton of stuff from them. Sometimes reading an article there, will show an ad, and it will remind me of something I was supposed to get. Then I will go over there and buy it. Almost exactly as I did with the magazine version. That said, click fraud has really burned a lot of advertisers. That is why advertising on content needs to shift to a performance based model, ads that let you know that someone went to a site after they saw the ad on your page, and bought it. That should net you a few $. As it stands, advertisers bid for 10,000 clicks at a nickel ($500 ad spend) and compare that to what they sell, and they come up poorly. If they set aside $500 to reward the first 100 people who clicked through and bought something you would find things to be very very different. Click fraud doesn't work if the value isn't in the click. But this migration is currently not happening as quickly as we would like.

aikah 12y ago
> That said, click fraud has really burned a lot of advertisers. THIS > That is why advertising on content needs to shift to a performance based model, As someone in the ad biz,it's something hard to do.You still need ways to track(I understand people don't like it but...) accurately where the traffic comes from.We really need innovative tools in that domain! Finally,I think the biggest disappointment in web marketing comes from the (un)ability of social medias to really influence sells.FB and co ad services are way worse than classic web advertising.It's borderline scammy.
- Donzo 12y ago
  Not picking a fight. This is a serious inquiry. How do you determine whether your budget was wasted on click fraud or just ineffective landing pages? Surely click fraud occurs, but how can you tell?
  - 12y ago

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

> During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. I think that's the wrong conclusion to draw. Advertising on web sites works very, very well and thousands of companies depend on it on a daily basis. What doesn't work so well is advertising on a web site that's just an online version of a magazine. The problem has a lot more to do with the magazine part than the web site aspect. I've been reading DrDobbs for a couple of decades and I'm a fan, but the simple truth is that it's become less relevant these past years. First switching to a download only model and then progressively nagging me pretty aggressively to download my own issue (which I stopped doing because the summaries I saw in the email were of little interest to me). Andrew, reading your editorials has always been a pleasure and you should be proud of what you accomplished.

andsmi2 12y ago
There is a bit of a feeling that advertising on web sites, much like SEO, is a bit of snake oil business....I agree with the op's statement-- when have you bought anything from a web advertisement anywhere? Maybe you have signed up for a service from one? But bought something? Even something very targeted.... although it does seem that "paid placement" in search -- (google search advertising) does provide some sales... Dvorak has been calling this out for some time.... advertisers seem to be catching up.
- Guvante 12y ago
  The value of the advertisement is not just "# of people who click and pay money", it is a very complex thing to analyze.
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    I think the irony is that the ability to see a path from view->CTR->action has severely devalued online advertising even though the theory behind it is no different from other, less introspectable forms of advertising. In other forms of advertising, the advertisor is forced to confront the fact that the connection between advertising and purchasing is not a direct process because they can't see it anyways. They can see that they advertise and somewhere down the line they can observe a general rise in sales or brand knowledge, but they can almost never tie that to even a campaign, let alone a particular impression. So you have this market for advertising where the advertisers can point to abysmal CTRs and say "See? I shouldn't be paying this much for such terrible action!" while still reaping the benefits of less tangible brand recognition down the road. And thus is born a race to the bottom.

astrodust 12y ago

I've never clicked on a TV commercial, I've never clicked on a magazine, and yet both do influence purchasing behaviour. Would you say that the online marketing fixation on hard metrics, like click-throughs, conversion rates, and page views have poisoned the well here? The engagement metrics for print and television are far softer because the complete data isn't available, they have to extrapolate from samples. I'm surprised that sponsorship isn't more of a thing. The rise of crowd-funded projects should be studied to see if a similar thing can't be done for magazines like this journal except instead of person to creator, more company to company.

aslewofmice 12y ago

Were the ad buys primarily sold direct? Was the site connected to any programmatic ad exchanges in any way? I visit the site and I see the same ad over and over (Interop Convention). Did you have anyone dedicated managing ad operations for the site? We're you selling any of your users data points to third-party data providers?* * For the people who hate the idea of a free content site selling your data, this is a good example of what happens.

tedbahr 12y ago
Programmatic Advertising is another way for advertisers to pay virtually nothing. The reason you see Interop over and over again is that this is a house ad - placed by UBM on a UBM site - in lieu of having any paid advertising. We run house ads and banners too - free to us - for our conferences on sdtimes.com Ted Bahr SD Times
- aslewofmice 12y ago
  But why serve house ads repeatedly when you can tap into programmatic exchange and monetize at least a portion of those impressions? Programmatic doesn't need to be first look on all impressions. If I'm on drdobbs.com in one tab and only being served house ads, but in my second tab I have retargeted ads being served to me, that's lost revenue for drdobbs.com

InclinedPlane 12y ago

I disagree with your conclusion. I am familiar with several sites who have no problem taking in significant ad revenue on content websites. The problem is that you can't just dump random ads on a site and expect that to work, it takes a lot of effort. The best ads tends to be curated to the point of being recommendations basically, but that may or may not work for every site.

downandout 12y ago

>During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. Adsense seems to do pretty well (~$12 billion/year). It's been dropping a bit, and many individual sites don't do well with it, but some do quite well. Did you guys ever experiment with it and test the earnings? Adsense and networks like it have the benefit of showing retargeted ads, so you can get considerably better CTR's and ad inventory relevant to each individual user than you would get from just showing static IDE maker ads. Closing down an institution like Dr. Dobb's can't be something you're doing lightly, but I cannot believe that there isn't some way to generate revenue from millions of engineers visiting your site every month. There are other tech publications that seem to do quite well.

GoodIntentions 12y ago
>Adsense seems to do pretty well (~$12 billion/year). No offense intended, but profitability of the entity selling the advert space does not mean return was generated for advertisers.
tedbahr 12y ago
Adsense for publishers worked about 10 years ago. My revenue (sdtimes.com) was about $700/month in 2004-5 or so. Not bad for virtually no work and 100% profit margin. Then $600/mo. Then $400. Then 2-3 years later down to $200/mo - meanwhile we were generating 3x the pageviews! When it got down to $140,mo we said forget it, not worth it. As did many many other publishers. There are trillions more ad venues (pages) to advertise on vs 10 years ago. Digital advertising may have gone way up, but it's way more spread out. Ted Bahr, SD Times, still printing!

smegel 12y ago

You know someone who bought 2 items based on ads they saw on a website? You must keep interesting company.

Animats 12y ago

Anyone likely to read Dr. Dobbs probably has an ad blocker.

danielweber 12y ago
How true is this? Sure, they're technically sophisticated, but that narrative could be overwhelmed by: 1. they aren't teenagers 2. they run websites that depend on ad revenue 3. they realize content creators need to get paid
- derekp7 12y ago
  Truthfully, I've never run an ad blocker before, until over the summer I got extremely fed up with a particular web site that I keep going to out of old habit (slashdot.org). A couple times I left a browser tab on the site, and in the middle of the night some video ads started playing through the computer speakers. And over the summer, I was at the camper on a hotspot connection, and accidentally burned through my entire month's bandwidth allotment because accidentally left their front page open when I went hiking for a few hours. Again, those aggressive video ads. So I installed an ad blocker, which actually made my 3g wifi hotspot usable over the summer. (Yes, I should stop visiting sites that get too annoying with aggressive ads, or I should just selectively block those sites).
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Omg, what the hell kind of dark pattern is it that waits 10 minutes to start playing an audio ad? It's one of those "I bet someone got a nice bonus for that" ideas that destroys user trust: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/922449.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/92244...
    - iSnow 12y ago
      If you serve audio ads on site with text content at all, you are a complete moron. The only thing they'll do is advertise the use of AdBlock.

asdkl234890 12y ago

I am really fascinated that this has only happened in the last 18 months? Why? It seems to have always been true?