Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads Without Selling Out? | Hacker News Reader

Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads Without Selling Out?

nytimes.com

33 pointsyungchin6 comments

With caveat of getting downvoted, I don't understand why ad supported businesses are derided especially on forums like HN.

1. Marketing & Visibility: Ads let small businesses (and of course startups) to gain visibility. How many startups don't use Google Adwords? Almost everyone.

2. Proven Model: Ad supported businesses are proven model of decades. Newspapers, radio, TV, magazines everyone used ads to subsidize "creativity".

3. Privacy: In digital realm, targeting and cookie dropping leads to privacy concerns. I completely agree. But all the data is mainly collected anonymously. As a young male in twenties, I'd much prefer my ads that are relevant to me. And I'm fine with data collection as long its free.

4. Democratization: Don't forget ads played critical role in democratization of Internet since everyone could join the party with minimal barriers. Imagine if all the services were paid. Even students from developing countries like India/China couldn't have afforded it due to currency imbalances.

5. Ads are crappy: Currently banner ads are crappy. I agree. Ads done right are always enjoyable. Who didn't enjoy the old spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign. All of my friends loved it. Remember, it was all digital campaign. Crappy ads lead to frustration. Auto-playing videos, page-takeovers, etc. are ugly, we must change that to make advertising attractive.

For web apps, the eCPM can be pretty horrible if you're not in a decent niche. Mobile eCPM is sliding downwards as well. If the ad supported business model is derided, it's because a lot of them treat monetization as an after-thought, rather than something that should be baked in the product. There's also a wishy-washy quality that a lot of people have, about thinking you can get ramen profitable just by slapping on an Adsense banner.

I agree with all your points, especially 3 and 5. I think privacy can be maintained to a general degree while still giving fairly good pinpoint demographics to the ad agencies. A major problem is that most companies don't know what to do with themselves with this kind of granular view of their targets, so they go with the mass produced spray-and-pray model used for other broadcast mediums. Google, I believe, has the right idea with targeted adwords that are relevant to what the user is looking at or what they search for.

One problem I have with the ad supported model is many services don't give the user the ability to pay and do away with advertising. There are many services that DO charge the user, and you notice that they don't rely on ad revenue to support themselves. However there is very little in between the two models. Reddit has a bit of this with it's ads for free users and no ads for "Reddit Gold", or their paying accounts. I can't think of another service, off the top of my head, that does this. I believe this could be a huge boon to many publishing and news services.

I agree with most of your points, and especially point 5 could be where Tumblr will improve on what we've had before: the way they go about things may well encourage the design of beautiful brand experiences.

As for point 3 though, if you read eg. 33bits.org you might be convinced otherwise, because it's in fact very difficult to really anonymise data.

Fred Wilson wrote about this today: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/in-defense-of-free.html

TL;DR : yes

Wouldn't the best route to take be making ads an opt in, they broker the ads and content creators get a piece of the action? And be able to blacklist certain ads

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