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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

I miss the days when you could simply buy an ad spot on a specific site for X days/months (no targeting, except when choosing what site to buy ad space on, an no javascript, just regular banner ads).

Is there still a market for these kind of low-tech ad buys these days?

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You can probably do it, but your competitor who do target users will end up with $30 CPA and you will get $300 (or worse). So, unless you are ok with x10 user aquisition cost, you will quickly stop doing it.

To say nothing about the fraud. If you can't link clicks to buys, you will quickly find yourself paying for bot clicks

/u/cj specifically lamented the lack of pay-for-time, not pay-per-click. Of course you have to track to accurately reward on a pay-per-click basis - that's why pay-per-click is a shitty model.

Automatic ads might be x10 cheaper, but x1000 less effective. Who knows your audience best, you or the automatic algorithms ? And automatic ads are easier to block, game and cheat.

>Automatic ads might be x10 cheaper, but x1000 less effective.

what are you talking about?

Lets say you are running SaaS for Azure admins. Do you want to buy the top banner on slashdot.com for the whole month, no targetings at all, for 50K/month, or you only want to show yor ad if user was interested in at least 2 stories with azure tag, for 5K/month?

Automatic (aka highly targeted) ads are more effective, not x1000 less.

I just love the automatic / highly targeted ads that I get for products I have already bought. It doesn't matter if it is a low end consumer product or high end hardware I get a lot of ads for things I have already purchased right after buying them.

Without any knowledge of the industry, it seems obvious to me that you can have one ad that goes to 99% people who don't want a product, and another ad that goes to 90%, and the latter is ten times as effective, even if it's annoying most people who see it.

I wonder why more people don't try to do this, and use that fact for marketing - as in, "we actually have a semblance of a moral compass, please shop with us".

Because it does not work. The cost is paid by customer, and he is looking for cheaper service/product.

And your competitor can always claim that 10% of client aqusition cost is donated to fight climate change... and then you stand no chance ;)

The highest conversion rate I've ever had on ads was when you could buy out a specific subreddit.

Now Reddit just sells generic key-word targeted ad-space and it's really not worth it anymore as you are selling your soul to an algorithm that doesn't know your audience.

There is codefund.io and carbon ads. Both very dev-focused, other than that, I know very little on the topic.

Though Codefund sells itself as an ethical advertiser. Something I would have previously considered an oxymoron. But here we are.

Disclaimer, I'm the founder of CodeFund.

CodeFund is what we consider "ethical" and different from Carbon Ads and other ad networks because (1) we do not allow 3rd party scripts, (2) no cookies accompany ads, (3) we are 100% open source (gitcoinco/code_fund_ads), (4) we only work with advertisers that provide relevant products and services that are good for the developer community, and (5) we literally do not store any private data, including IP addresses.

I recommend reading https://codefund.io/blog/countering-negative-press-how-ethic...

Interesting and informative read. In particular, I like the way you explained how the ad selection process works on a typical page. I've been looking for a reference to link to for an article of mine about ads.

Speaking of ethical practices, why is there a notification icon on a blog, and why is it having a seizure? :).

When I was active in the Minecraft server scene, minecraftservers.org (and other sites) had very simple low-tech bidding like this. I presume it's still mostly the same.

They would hold weekly/monthly auctions for a "Sponsored Server" slot (your listing shows at the top of the page). Can't remember if it was weekly or monthly, but I recall prices being around $7-8k per slot. This was just implemented on the website as a super simple auction, you could see all bids and could only bid higher and the auction would expire at some set time.

Then there was an even more low-tech layer around it all - people would rent their spots to smaller servers that couldn't afford to outright buy a slot. This was implemented as... Google Sheets with one cell for each hour time slot, with the sheets being linked to on various forums. You just sent a message to the Skype contact if you wanted to buy an hour or two, and for a couple hundred bucks you, too, could show off your server in your very own temporary minecraftservers.org sponsored slot.

Is there still a market for these kind of low-tech ad buys these days?

Yes, but often you have to contact the web site directly.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the non-Google ad companies like Exponential will do this, too. They did it before Google existed. They might still have that ability.

> Yes, but often you have to contact the web site directly.

Gorsh, sure sounds hard to be a marketer. Sometimes you have to do some work.

A metric ton of ads are still sold like this but still get served through ad servers like DFP, which can source inventory from these direct ad sales or AdSense depending on which makes the most money.

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