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Comment by abakker | Hacker News Reader

OOC, what does "Scale" even mean here? is the OP saying you cannot infinitely serve ads because a given piece of content only attracts a finite number of viewers? or that there are a finite number of subject for a piece of content that can have relevant ads served?

To borrow your terrorist example, presumably there are no advertisers (that we permit and condone) who would like to advertise terrorism related products?

Do we have any reasonable numbers for what portion of actual web traffic is related to either product/service research or future purchase plans? My impression of my own browsing traffic is that it is probably about 50% by number of page loads.

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You can cut the number of pages you place adverts on by quite a number when you can raise prices (in fact, probably quite a lot of news brands could cut them from their news stories entirely and just have them on their lifestyle content, especially on advertorials which often only need minimal configuration on their end). The issue with scale is the physical act of identifying and buying.

The best kind of contextual advertising is direct buy aligned with the content. For that, you need a big sales team cutting deals - you can't just tell your one man-band digital marketer to plug some demo info into a bidding platform and be done with it.

My programmatic spend was probably 10x my largest direct buy, but was a simple 20 minute phone call with the buying agency vs a month long BS sales cycle with the company I was direct buying from (although the lunches are nicer...).

"what does "Scale" even mean here?"

I meant in context of the number of publishers that advertisers need to deal with to purchase impressions.

Cutting out the ad networks probably makes sense for Ster and NPO. I know nothing about Dutch media, but I'm guessing they're big enough to court large brands with big marketing budgets on their own.

[edit: The "Mass media in the Netherlands" Wikipedia page is bananas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media_in_the_Netherlands. I'm gathering advertising on NPO is regulated by a public body; the STER from the article.]

NPO is the public broadcaster umbrella organization. It could very roughly be compared to e.g. BBC, with the big caveat that NPO itself does not create any content. Instead, its member broadcasters do. That's a relic of the Dutch pillarized system. NPO is funded both through taxes, and through advertisements. STER is the organization that handles the latter, and indeed it is a public body.

Presumably they mean that contextual advertising is hard to automate, thus requires consistent marginal human effort for each marginal amount of revenue. (Not sure that's true, but it's what "scale" generally tends to mean.)

> presumably there are no advertisers (that we permit and condone) who would like to advertise terrorism related products?

How about a handgun ad (tagline: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.")? Assuming the advertisee isn't in a oppressive regime, you can make money by selling them guns (or ammo if they already have guns), and do some minor bit of good by increasing the chances that the next terrorist is shot dead before they can kill anyone. (If they are in a oppressive regime, you've at least added one more bit of impetus toward violently overthrowing said regime, and hey, maybe they'll buy one of your guns on the black market.)

Edit: depending on the type of terrorist attack, you could probably advertise other emergency supplies like gas masks or fire extinguishers.

What about counter-terrorism products? I can totally whip up some copy for anti-virus or firewall software by referencing terrorism. It's not a direct connection, but probably strong enough.

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