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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Everyone not in the ad industry loves to make claims about how its going to fall apart, but no one I've seen has the expertise and data needed to back up their claims.

Maybe the author has a point, but this article is incoherent. There is no sources and the entirety is predicated on baseless assumptions and some analogy.

No sources or even attempt to prove any claims:

- There are too many publishers

- There is a fixed amount of 'revenue seats'

- Google/fb/etc take a portion of that fixed revenue

- etc.

I don't even know what 'too many publishers' really means, but there is undoubtedly not a fixed amount of revenue (double digit growth every year in digital ad spend), and google/fb only increase that total amount of ad revenue by acting as a ssp/dsp/exchange.

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The author is a career journalist/digital publisher with lots of professional contacts in the industry. He has spent lots of time investigating digital media business models and the financial health of digital media companies. His own company has transitioned from being mostly ad supported to being mostly directly reader supported in the past few years.

He is just making a blog observation, which can be best read in the context of the rest of his site/blog, which have been talking about similar issues for years. Much of his evidence is scattered through tiny posts, which blog readers are assumed to have been following. It’s not supposed to be a deep carefully cited research article.

Eh I guess without any context then its not a very useful blog post. I'd still like to see some links or an attempt at verifying some claims. Even a byline with his industry experience would help.

It's posted on TPM on the "Editor's Blog" and the byline says "Josh Marshall is editor and publisher of TalkingPointsMemo.com." what else do you need on his credentials?

There are links scattered throughout, but part of the point of this post is that no one is really talking about this issue at least at the depth it deserves, so understandably it's light on references. In this case, I'd treat a lot of this as an original source.

Thats completely meaningless. I've got that byline on 4 different websites. There is one link in the entire post. So because it deserves depth, he does the opposite?

There are thousands of 'publishers' like this - I don't believe he's qualified to claim the industry is broken. He can't see anything from a macro perspective.

He's a Polk Award-winning journalist, he has a History PhD from Brown, and he has written for many other publications over at least the last 20 years.

Given that he has a wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Marshall, it's pretty obvious that you're not interested in doing the slightest bit of research into the subject that you're criticizing.

All of which should go in his by-line.

> There is a fixed amount of 'revenue seats' > Google/fb/etc take a portion of that fixed revenue

If you need citations for these, your burden of proof is a bit too extreme.

Unless advertisers have an infinite amount of money, there will be a finite amount of ad revenue. At some point, there's a floor to how much ad revenue you can capture while still having enough money to maintain a journalistic organization, creating a fixed number of 'revenue seats'.

A portion of that money will by default go to the largest players in the market, Google and Facebook.

The real question is how much advertisers need online display. Most don't need much. Honestly, online display has more meaningful competition from print (yes), radio, and TV because it's more geared to branding.

For direct response, generally speaking online ads are more cost effective. For the most part, you don't need to place direct response ads on publishers' websites. You can just put them on FB or Google search.

I would say that it's a simple issue of aesthetics and performance. Banner ads look like total garbage. Video ads on Youtube videos tend to be less appealing than video ads on a big screen TV. Tiny thumbnail video ads on news websites are visual pollution at best and a total annoyance at worst.

My point below that is that those large publishers increase the amount of revenue available. So they take a percent, but the entire pie would be smaller without them.

With double digit growth, supply isn't fixed and its a common idea that supply (from an advertiser perspective) is effectively unlimited.

Here's something with a bit more detail about how the author has approached the revenue issue: http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/07/with-11000-subscribers-talk...

I'll add it to my reading list, thanks. Although this is the most overused fucking trope in digital media:

> “The idea of publications totally based on advertising is, I think, an illusion. Some can do it, but I don’t think it’s ever going to be a sustainable model for most publications.”

Like TV and radio never even existed.

I have to pay for my TV and radio these days ?

TV and radio ads are sold by a limited amount of players at a local, regional, and national level. The ability to target smaller groups of consumers online that are more likely to be interested in the displayed ads is analogous to local/regional ads on some level.

Last I checked TV has taken a beating from Netflix and other streaming platforms.

I personally never believed in new media's limitless newconomy rise to the stars. Nobody wanted to pay for newspapers anymore but web journalism was going to be different?

Internet advertising is growing up.

> Everyone not in the ad industry loves to make claims about how its going to fall apart, but no one I've seen has the expertise and data needed to back up their claims.

That doesn't mean they are wrong. Frankly it fits in neatly with the theory that such data is not data that ad companies want to know, so therefore, they don't.

There is an overwhelming consensus by a huge number of very well informed and intelligent people pointing to the advertising business model as it exists now and saying, "This is not sustainable." I'm not saying they're right, I'm not qualified to say that, but the response from the ad industry is by and large to stick their fingers in their ears and hum loudly and that should make any potential investor worry.

>>No sources or even attempt to prove any claims: - There are too many publishers

Maybe the market is deciding? Mashable sold for $50 Million which is no chump change but way less than last year.

>>- There is a fixed amount of 'revenue seats'

Isn't it? Does it grow every time one launches their own blog or Buzzfeed?

- Google/fb/etc take a portion of that fixed revenue

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+facebook+revenue+ad+dollars...

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