Why Ad Blockers Work
blog.mozilla.com
blog.mozilla.com
Advertising online is threatening to offline advertising professionals and publishers, but these two statements are not co-extant. The reason Google is taking over the world is that when Big Brand Advertiser's outsourced advertising firm gets slick-talked into spending six figures on a single page advertisement in Vogue, nobody has a bleeping clue whether that particular advertisement actually advanced business goals or not. Spend six figures on AdWords driving folks to your landing page, though, and you can track the ROI fairly accurately.
This comment indicates you didn't RTFA. The entire point of it was to suggest that high traffic content sites would benefit from a way to move their own ads, but stay "above the line" and be accountable for results.
Basically, when Rupert Murdoch flips out about Google, he is on to something. He says that his product is being commoditized by its compliment. His reaction is to charge for consumers for content, and cut off air supply. My thought is that these sites should run their own ad sales, since that is where they actually generate cash. A core competency, one would hope.
Another comment here says that would generate a bunch of costs from non-standard deals. It needn't be so. There are already standard ad sizes. A middle man isn't required for standard terms.
People outsource their ad sales to Google, Doubleclick and similar providers not because they can't rig up systems to audit and provide metrics, but because they can't actually sell the ad space themselves.. (it's the "outsource what you suck at" thing)
The Deck perhaps a good example of one of a new breed of advertisers that work together with the sites they actual advertise on. I can't wait for this to get more common.
The problem with this wish, though, isn't that people aren't willing to charge $7900 per month, interact with advertisers, and do it right and with class.. but that there just aren't many companies who want to advertise in that way.
Big advertisers like Microsoft, IBM, or whoever, could approach small, boutique sites and directly advertise with them in a tasteful, selective way.. but they don't. Their ad agencies farm everything out to the big networks to keep things easy.
The problem is with the advertisers avoiding anyone who isn't a giant network or household name in publisher, not the small publishers.
In my opinion the key distinction is that you're directly serving ads as part of your content, instead of embedding some arbitrary external content into your pages. If you wanted to, you could just proxy Google/Doubleclick ads through your own webserver - except right now, they won't pay you to do that (even though it might get more impressions!)
But you're right, there's no reason they couldn't expand this sort of model to allow site hosts to pick ads as well.
I think what the post was getting at was that most people buy fashion magazines for the ads, because the ads are well crafted and made by the best photographers in the field. Some of them are pretty damn close to art. The ads are actually part of the magazine and not just a money-maker. You'd think this type of integration would be easier on the web, but no most sites would rather just throw a banner on the sidebar, another on top of the navigation and call it a day.
I think new media sites are getting better at this. And if the iPad (and the webapp-style magazines it was created for) ever takes off I think we'll see this sort of thing more.
The technical reason why it's really easy to block huge swaths of internet advertising is because unless the advertiser is serving the ads themselves they don't trust that they're being served.
If you serve the ads from your own domain, then the filters necessary become very complicated very quickly.
So if I understand his proposal, it's to allow bloggers to serve google/doubleclick/etc ads from their own domains to avoid the adblockers, but with some sort of reliable audit system to ensure the ads are being served as often as the advertiser is paying for.
To date, running that post was by far the best thing we've done to counteract ad blockers. We saw a measurable bump in our pageview to ad served ratio, and we sold a ton of subscriptions.
Even though I detest advertising, I think a lot of what I detest about them could be seriously mitigated by turning advertising into something a business plans and designs for. Let's get some applicants to Y Combinator next season that try to figure this out.
Secondly, running your own ad server really just guarantees that your specific ads will end up blocked by the vast majority of people running ad blockers. There is an entire Easylist ruleset specifically for site hosted ads: https://hg.adblockplus.org/easylist/file/8811cd8afb56/easyli...
The only unblockable way of showing ads to people is by selling sponsored content. It's shady as hell, but many sites do it.
This is why we ran our little experiment to hide content for people using AdBlock Plus on Friday night. We wanted to see how many people noticed (a lot) and we wanted to know how quickly Easylist was updated (about 8 hours).
Self-hosting ads doesn't mean the site pays more attention to the choice of ads, any more than using a third party ad-system means that a site doesn't pay attention to the choice of ads.
If sites self-served ads, people would develop ad blockers that blocked them. Just because third-party ad server filtering is the standard way ad-blocking works now, we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking the third-party ad servers are the reason people block ads.
And of course once you break down the barrier between content and ads you have a much more serious risk of conflict of interest. Major TV stations, magazines and newspapers will often avoid news articles that are disparaging of their major advertisers, something that doesn't occur when there's a complete separation of ad sales and content provision.
Also, I suspect ads work better if people actually like them.
Uhm, what?! When I go to the cinema there is maybe 5 minutes of ads, then 5-10 minutes of new movie trailers, then the movie starts. And you can come in after the ads & trailers if you want (but not many people do this).
I don't understand why people go to the cinema if they have to watch an HOUR of ads, especially because you can buy the DVD and watch ad-free. The cinemas should have an option to pay $x to skip ads.
Anyway, I still go to the movies a lot. If you show up early to get a good seat you end up watching generic advertising while getting popcorn etc, then in the theater before showtime you get the same generic advertising. Then, at the stated movie start or a little after you get 7-10 minutes of higher quantity advertising, then 5 to 15 minutes of movie previews then the movie.
So, if you show up early enough and you really can watch a full hour of advertising before the movie starts. However, if you don't mind sacrificing a good seat or just go at an off time you can avoid most if not all of that.
When you buy a ticket here the cashier asks you where you want to sit.
Luckily, here in Portugal most movies have reserved seats on their most busy schedules and are free-seating on the slow schedules. So you can go by just arriving at the scheduled start time or a few minutes later, seeing only the trailers and 5 minutes of better quality commercials at most.
Maybe an "ad-free" version of the film playing during times of the day when movie patronage is slow.
But I gotta say that DVDs are full of ads just like the theaters. I just watched a Clorox commercial on my Mad Men blu-ray. (I saw the ad three times actually because they show it every time you start the disc.)
That's exactly what I was thinking. Happened to me with Avatar in a big cinema.
It's hard enough when companies try and bully us by restricting access since they're not really happy with our coverage. At least then we're not implicitly encouraging authors to mind their tongues. :)