In a broader sense, it's very questionable to say "Gee, content sites should be profitable!" and cheerfully avoid explaining just how, especially right after you've finished explaining how every known method of monetizing content just won't work.
Millions of people who don't care one bit about sports watch the SuperBowl for the ads.
Users fundamentally don't want annoying, content-blocking, misleading, irrelevant, privacy-compromising, browser-slowing ads. A couple of internet ad companies that have gotten away from this model are The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/) and Project Wonderful (http://www.projectwonderful.com/).
Millions? Really? I don't think so.
If anything, they can pull up the ads on Hulu or YouTube if they really weren't otherwise interested in the game.
106.5 million people in the US viewed the last Superbowl. According to Nielsen (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/survey-most-sup...) 51% enjoy the commercials more than the game. Of the ~54 million viewers who enjoy the commercials more than the game, how many have no interest in the game at all? I'd wager it's a number rightly measured in "millions".
Going back to the original point: the claim was made that people don't want to see ads. Yet ~54 million U.S. Superbowl viewers wanted to see the ads more than the game. The problem isn't with "ads" per se, but with the way advertising is conducted on the internet (which is the point the original article made.)
That's an awful lot to sit through with no interest; not buying it.
"The problem isn't with "ads" per se, but with the way advertising is conducted on the internet (which is the point the original article made.)"
And would the phenomenon of Superbowl commercials even exist if people didn't have to sit through commercials in live TV? The answer is obviously not. You're talking about a side-effect of a technological limitation. If commercials aired on a side-channel that could be blocked without losing the show, we'd never have seen the development of high-priced, hyped Superbowl commercials.
These media are fundamentally different.
"would the phenomenon of Superbowl commercials even exist"
Unlikely. But the fact that the phenomenon does exist demonstrates that people ARE interested in advertising under certain circumstances.
The internet is fundamentally different, but people are fundamentally the same. The problem here is not "people hate ads", it's "people hate ads of the sort that are common on the internet, they hate them enough to seek technological solutions to block them, and the technological solutions are often applied in such a way as to block all ads indiscriminately."
The problem isn't with "advertising" as a whole. It's with advertising as it's currently done on the internet.
I think it demonstrates that people are desperate for a common experience (usually to make small-talk about.)
Superbowl ads are convenient since it is a safe subject to bring up for both people who watched the game as well as those who do not care or or do not understand the game. This is also why we have celebrities.
But I think one of the main points is, be smart and use restraint when necessary. If a publisher comes to you and says "Hey, we have a new ad unit that takes over the page!" the advertiser should know that it's a bad idea and use restraint instead of buying up any new ad unit that's presented to them.
If you look at mobile advertising, the click-through rates are 10 times better than online. Why? Mainly because there is less screen, so there is less ad clutter. So it's an approach that works.
But basically, publishers and advertisers are lazy and instead of looking at data and figuring out creative ways to grow, they just spend more money to try to increase return.
It works ok for entertainment, but do you really want to read an article like "Why you shouldn't move your sites to the cloud, brought to you by IBM"?
Well, it saddens me that people running adblockers will force many sites to do this to survive.
Tech journalism aside it's perfectly possible to make ads that rise above the perpetual noise of CONSUME! advertising we all live with. Look at things like Honda's "Cog" or Old Spice's "I'm on a horse".
If there's a better example of why many people block ads than [1] I don't know what it is.
I don't even bother to block ads anymore. I see a double-underlined word, a popup or a 90%-noise blogspam page and I just hit back. There's so much content out there that doesn't abuse your attention why bother with the noise?
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/akj4z/get_your_mcdigg_...
On the other hand, the grating "Head On" ads spurred a lot of sales.
Clearly, companies find putting ads on your site worthwhile, even if they're less creative by doing so. You, in turn, find taking their money worthwhile enough show us those ads.
Which approach brings in more money? Is the truth ultimately that conventional site ads still tend to work?
And, yes, we do have conventional ads on the site -- and I'm guessing you're not a regular Techdirt reader (which is totally cool, by the way), but we've discussed this. Having conventional ads is a way to get companies to talk to us about the other offerings that we do. They basically act as lead generation for us because so many companies only think traditionally, they contact us about advertising, and we try to steer them towards other, smarter, programs. But we still let ads go through, even if we tell them that they won't be particularly effective. If people still want to give us money for no good reason, that's their mistake. But we are careful not to take intrusive ads.
And, our ad revenue is less than 15% of the site's revenue (during Q4 it goes higher). So, no, the conventional ads are a waste, and I expect them to die out over time. But, for now, they're a great way to get companies to pay us to become leads for more creative solutions.
Admittedly, that's a slightly different issue.
It'd be good if we stopped pretending everyone runs adblock. 99.5%+ of people have no issue with ads, and actually find them useful.
That 0.5% who run adblock etc, really aren't worth worrying about much.
Then again, it also probably has a larger percentage of people that wouldn't pay any attention to the ads even if they were visible. From Ars' point of view it would be great if these people shut of their ad blockers, but the advertisers would probably be getting the short end of the stick, in that case, which would (over the long term) drive advertising prices down, etc. Ars would pick up some profits in the meantime, but solely at the expense of the advertisers, who are now getting screwed by paying for eyeballs that are worth less on average than the ones when people weren't shutting their ad blockers down. I'd certainly pay less for per-impression ads on a site that wouldn't show content to people with an ad blocker, for this very reason.
It's a grand circle of life, and frankly, it's hard to say what second order effects any of these actions might have. It very well may be that the presence of ad blockers raises the average value of the eyeballs that do see the ads enough that advertising prices end up higher and Ars does better overall. It's equally possible that they're correct, the ad market hasn't adjusted to the presence of ad blockers yet, and they're still getting paid too little per-eyeball. I'm not sure. Neither are they.
But in theory, at least, over the long term, if people with ad blockers really aren't paying any attention to ads anyways, the market should correct for this and the results for both advertisers and the sites providing ad space should approach the true value.
My gut feeling is that people who block ads globally but see them on Ars would actually notice/respond to them better than people who are just generally banner blind. If the majority of the people who've emailed us are to be believed, they don't see anything else on the page except ads when they have ads enabled. I bet advertisers would kill for that. ;)
The biggest problem is that there's no chance someone blocking ads is going to see an ad, and there's a real (but maybe tiny) chance that same person would respond to an ad. There's an even better chance that they'd respond to a really nice campaign that "spoke" to them.
That 0.5% who run adblock etc, really aren't worth worrying about much."
Adblock plus on mozilla.org gets around 1,000,000 downloads per week. It may not be a huge percentage now, but if it continues at this rate, it will be.
I have a site with (in february) 37663 pageviews reported by google adsense, but 49581 pageviews reported by google analytics. If the mismatch there is from adblockers, then I must be an outlier. I hope it is that google didnt have ads to match and displayed some public information message instead.
I'm not bitter or anything though. I block ads myself, mostly because I'm too afraid of accidentally clicking ads on a site of my own, and the punishment that can lead to.
Please do. I certainly wasn't pretending that in the first place.
If you are simply interested in generating revenue from any corporate sponsor, the question becomes a little bit more open ended.
I think that is what he is pointing out with his specific examples about UPS, Intel, and Sun. Not only were the companies sponsoring content, they were sponsoring a specific project that interested all parties involved (and disclosing that).
The interesting subtext of this discussion is that as users we really hate the sketchy tactics put forth by ad-networks, and that as content providers, ad-networks are the 'easy' solution (easier than doing real legwork to get actual corporate sponsors).