The Digital Advertising Duopoly
avc.com
avc.com
Most publishers cram their websites with ads. The number of low-content, click-baity websites is just staggering. Sometimes I wonder how could this even be a profitable proposition for advertisers. This is one reason why Google absolutely dominates the space. It has the capability to deal with all the fraud, calculate the right reward for publishers, and give a meaningful ROI to the advertiser.
Maybe a new kind of advertisement medium could unseat Google from its dominance but the way digital advertising works today, it sounds like an impossible idea.
We sell our own advertising space, self-host it, and use static jpgs for the graphics.
The ads are also targeted against the content (office design) and tend to be for products like office furniture. In a roundabout way this targets the readers but only because if they are on the site they are likely interested in learning about new products in their field.
giantbomb.com (ads + subscription only content) 4chan (I would like someone to explain it more deeply to me, but I think they run their own ads, do they use an outside service?)
Having users pay for ads instead of third parties keeps it quite neat and generally quite safe, but I don’t think 4Chan itself is profitable.
Doesn't radio advertising have a similar duopoly? Same for outdoor advertising?
The internet never delivered disintermediation, it only changed who those intermediaries were.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-google-facebook-duopoly-thr...
Discussed here:
There's already a service that is probably capable of doing what you ask. It's called google analytics. Google's in the payment business, and google's in the tracking business. If only all publishers could agree to use analytics.js, and petition google to implement micropayments with some agreed upon fee structure.
Anyway, that is roughly how such a service might work. I am sure that even better safeguards could be designed into it.
Google's has the Google Contributor option [1], but that only applies for ads via their ad network and not other potential sources. There's also Flattr which is not as automated but it's now owned by AdBlockPlus crew and has raised rates so it's not such a transparent and clean system anymore.
I'm not asking in order to do something like this, just that I think it's an interesting question about exactly who is able to profit from activities that are somewhat assumed to be occurring everywhere, and not by and within the ad networks that everybody is using.
Browser history predicts almost nothing, anyway. There is no market where user data is bought and sold, except for spammy mailing lists to other spammy mailing lists.
There is a vast market for consumer data (which is more than just browsing history) with everything from credit agencies like Equifax to data brokers like Axciom to traditional analytics companies like Nielsen and Comscore to top tech companies like Google, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and others that have marketing clouds with DMP platforms. It's a massive industry.
Publishers can participate in selling user logins and analytics data through various data companies, they're always interested in more data and especially anything unique that your site adds. You should have a certain scale though for the contract to be worth it, otherwise if its just a personal blog then you're probably just limited to run adding some ads from the typical ad networks.
1. The browser 2. The app store or 3. The OS
Oh, wait...
I (and others) am working on this; I call it microsubscription. It's a common idea: I've seen maybe a dozen closely-related variations on it since hitting on it.
In typical techie fashion I became obsessed with the technical problem of preventing publishers from inflating their figures while also preserving user privacy. I solved it, was granted a relevant patent two days ago and I guess we'll see what happens in 2018.
Patent link?
>We need models that support free consumption of media for many reasons.
If you rule out paid subscriptions to subsidize the freeriders, what options are left for "free" consumption? Either advertisements or a government-sponsored system (e.g. citizens taxed to support the BBC tv channels).
If there's a crypto financing option that Fred is hinting at, what would that look like?
My hypothesis is subscriptions, for news at least, are all-or-nothing propositions. But in a world where there's so much content, much of it for free, we will only want to bypass a paywall for a given site occasionally when we encounter it.
Why hasn't someone built a variable subscription model that is geared to one's reading habits?
He's ok with subscriptions. However, his particular statement is in context of subscriptions interfering with providing free content.
As far as I can tell, if we want to have websites provide "free" content we have the following choices to that puzzle:
1) sponsored by advertisers
2) sponsored by government taxes (e.g. collect a new "web usage tax" from citizens to fund a CitizenBook as free alternative to Facebook ads and PublicNewsTimes as free alternative to New York Times paid subscription. I doubt that enough voters would support such a tax just to avoid ads.)
3) blockchain? cryptocurrency? (Not sure what Fred has seen with this option.)
The idea of variable subscription models is interesting, especially if the consumer can see detailed justifications for their bill. I think that's a key point in battling subscription fatigue.
Software companies water down their financial models to a very simplistic bill, partly because there's no way of (easily) variably billing consumers of their software, but also because it's easy to understand.
I know that if I received an easily digestible bill of my monthly Spotify usage, and was charged more than what I'm currently paying for on my fixed plan, I'd be ok with it. I also know that if I'm not using Spotify as much for a specific month, and was charged less than what I normally pay for it, I'd also be very ok with it!
-- Search engines clobbering "portals". -- The huge subscription market for Bloomberg, et al. (In its early years, Bloomberg consistently offered more information than its competitors.) -- ASCAP. -- Netflix. -- Kindle Unlimited.
More limited subscriptions can of course succeed if their value propositions are sufficiently simple and compelling. For example: -- Pre-internet, business newsletters and almanacs had a good market, especially if they had valuable and unique raw information. -- Pre-internet, the only categories of consumer newsletter that had good markets were in investments and health. In both those cases, the value proposition is pretty clear. -- Our household subscribes to HBO almost solely for Game of Thrones.
Take a look at http://steemit.com/ for instance. It's kind of a Reddit clone based on that model. I think it still only has fewer than 1 million users, which means the quality of the user-generated posts won't be as good even as that from the (much larger) Reddit right now. But the tipping itself seems to be (largely) working.
I say largely, because last I checked months ago, I still thought it prioritized a sort of feedback loop for the "rich to get richer" on the platform. But this is easy to change with an algorithm update. My guess is the main reason they don't do it is because having people earn "$1,000 per post" is getting them a lot of publicity and word of mouth promotion, compared to if they made it so "almost everyone can earn at least $1-$5 on every post".
But as the platform grows (and the money on the platform grows with it) I would like to imagine they won't allow the "famous posters" to make tens of thousands of dollars on every post, and they will try to redistribute that to the rest of the platform users. If they don't do that, the platform will fail under its own weight anyway, and another competing cryptocurrency tipping platform will take its place.
But overall, I think this sort of platform has extremely high potential. I've seen many smaller-time Youtubers start using it, because it almost immediately allowed them to make more money than they made from YouTube alone.
Oh, and perhaps the "secret sauce" of the Steemit.com site is that it also spreads the earnings with the upvoters/downvoters as well as the commenters, which is basically paying for the curation of the platform, thus offering real monetary incentive to do those actions properly (although I imagine there may be some who try to abuse it, too).
We have that already. In fact, we've had it for a while. The problem is that we keep taking something that is already free to distribute, and putting it behind arbitrary gates. We then think it's perfectly normal to pay the gatekeepers.
I don't know why we still use this model which hasn't made sense for >10 years.
e: link
As far as I know in the U.S. there's a long history of talking about specifically taxing ads, but very little and brief doing. One overview: http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/E6C2E18E1E...
Why is it a failure? Price? Quality? Something else? I'm not convinced this is a problem.
Allowing your largest companies to compete over hijacking your public's attention is precisely the sort of thing that reeks of government failure.
This generation of internet users is a lot more willing to pay for content than mine was. Gen X's reluctance to spend money online is what created the attention economy to begin with. Maybe the shift will happen on its own, but how much damage will we do in the meantime?
I'm thankful that my government has allowed innovation to continue. I'm glad they have represented my interests as a consumer by favoring technological growth over protection I neither want nor need.
You're welcome, by the way.
YouTube is closer to Spotify but would probably still be impossible without Google's massive investment. Dailymotion is pretty far behind.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest this is the case. Do you know of any?
Did you miss the whole Facebook "fake news" thing last year?
Do you think that they would really get "better" for a consumer, or more covert as they become "smarter"? I'd assume the latter.
You should want it and it's weird not to expect it because the EU has already begun.
Innovation would be my preference. The more corrupt a monopoly becomes, the more motivated the best engineers are to join a startup with a "Don't be evil" mission to take them down. ;)
But no, I'm sure literally everything government does that interacts with the market just creates corruption without sufficient benefit to outweigh any such harm, and it'd be better if we didn't do anything at all. Certainly it's easier to think about politics if we can permanently rule out an entire class of solutions this way, saving us from having to consider and weigh each per se. Bonus points if we can define "liberty" as "fewest things outlawed by government"—measuring that is way easier than trying to figure out the degrees of freedom of action available to ordinary people in practice.
This isn’t the natural progression of free market capitalism though. The money will flow to those who are best able to use it to control the behavior of their customers spending. Making someone happy is just one way of controlling their spending, but there are many, many others.
Capital flows to those most able to make money, which isn't necessarily by "converting it into the most happiness." You can even see it in this space: Facebook is the dominant social network and wins by essentially getting people addicted to getting mild social affirmations from a slot machine. Studies have actually shown social network use makes people less happy.