4 ms·

What this tells me is that if you're running a website that uses Google advertising as your primary source of revenue, you should probably sell up now and get o

by beedogs 12y ago

What this tells me is that if you're running a website that uses Google advertising as your primary source of revenue, you should probably sell up now and get out while the getting is good. Ad-based sites simply cannot survive anymore.

filmgirlcw 12y ago
Google AdSense stopped being a viable source of ad income for even large-traffic publishers more than 6 years ago. To be clear: as-based sites can absolutely survive, but you need a sales team and good as-ops. The best CPMs are going to come from sales people getting deals done, not algorithms and text ads. That market died in 2008.
adventured 12y ago
That's obviously false. Whether you can survive on ads is strictly based on your cost of operations. The Internet is overflowing with ad-based sites, and will continue to be. Some will die, the radical majority will not. Five years from now there will be more ad supported sites than there are today. The alternative to Google is to run your own advertising. This is especially true for sites with the scale of Gigaom.
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  Well, you'd have to try to provide something that Google can't, like "native advertising". But any respectable organization would not run native. Google is simply too good at matching viewers to advertising that is valuable to them (and therefore the publisher). Running your own advertising is hard to be successful with, unless you can convince your advertiser to really overpay.
  - filmgirlcw 12y ago
    >Google is simply too good at matching viewers to advertising that is valuable to them (and therefore the publisher). This is so wrong, I don't even know where to start. Google is very good at managing ad inventory and putting ads from said inventory in front of people. What they aren't good at (or even care about being good at) is getting the right inventory mix for the right site. That requires focused sales teams. I'm not going to go down the native advertising rabbit hole because I don't have time ro have the conversation it needs to have, but I will say that whatever you think it is, it's both better and worse than that. And everyone who is successful in publishing does it to some extent, maybe just by a different name. And it's not new. It's been happening since the beginning of mass media. I can understand not liking advertorials or content that is unclear, but there are not plenty of people making native advertising that doesn't interfere with editorial missions. >Running your own advertising is hard to be successful with, unless you can convince your advertiser to really overpay. Again, this is not true. For a small publisher, running your ads is probably not worth the tech or sales investment. If you're the scale of a GigaOm, you need to take control of your ad game yourself. You can supplement sith ad networks, but the real money comes from doing it yourself. And with good ad ops, you can also provide a way better experience for the ad buyer. Again, we're not talking about small one person publishers. We're talking t about sites that do millions of uniques and have full staff. If you're doing that and not maintaininf tour own sales staff, you're leaving money on the table, incompetent, or you have a product no one wants. Or all three.

by beedogs 12y ago

filmgirlcw 12y ago

Google AdSense stopped being a viable source of ad income for even large-traffic publishers more than 6 years ago. To be clear: as-based sites can absolutely survive, but you need a sales team and good as-ops. The best CPMs are going to come from sales people getting deals done, not algorithms and text ads. That market died in 2008.

adventured 12y ago

That's obviously false. Whether you can survive on ads is strictly based on your cost of operations. The Internet is overflowing with ad-based sites, and will continue to be. Some will die, the radical majority will not. Five years from now there will be more ad supported sites than there are today. The alternative to Google is to run your own advertising. This is especially true for sites with the scale of Gigaom.

Scoundreller 12y ago
Well, you'd have to try to provide something that Google can't, like "native advertising". But any respectable organization would not run native. Google is simply too good at matching viewers to advertising that is valuable to them (and therefore the publisher). Running your own advertising is hard to be successful with, unless you can convince your advertiser to really overpay.
- filmgirlcw 12y ago
  >Google is simply too good at matching viewers to advertising that is valuable to them (and therefore the publisher). This is so wrong, I don't even know where to start. Google is very good at managing ad inventory and putting ads from said inventory in front of people. What they aren't good at (or even care about being good at) is getting the right inventory mix for the right site. That requires focused sales teams. I'm not going to go down the native advertising rabbit hole because I don't have time ro have the conversation it needs to have, but I will say that whatever you think it is, it's both better and worse than that. And everyone who is successful in publishing does it to some extent, maybe just by a different name. And it's not new. It's been happening since the beginning of mass media. I can understand not liking advertorials or content that is unclear, but there are not plenty of people making native advertising that doesn't interfere with editorial missions. >Running your own advertising is hard to be successful with, unless you can convince your advertiser to really overpay. Again, this is not true. For a small publisher, running your ads is probably not worth the tech or sales investment. If you're the scale of a GigaOm, you need to take control of your ad game yourself. You can supplement sith ad networks, but the real money comes from doing it yourself. And with good ad ops, you can also provide a way better experience for the ad buyer. Again, we're not talking about small one person publishers. We're talking t about sites that do millions of uniques and have full staff. If you're doing that and not maintaininf tour own sales staff, you're leaving money on the table, incompetent, or you have a product no one wants. Or all three.