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Comment by zak_mc_kracken | Hacker News Reader

> During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all.

I think that's the wrong conclusion to draw.

Advertising on web sites works very, very well and thousands of companies depend on it on a daily basis.

What doesn't work so well is advertising on a web site that's just an online version of a magazine. The problem has a lot more to do with the magazine part than the web site aspect.

I've been reading DrDobbs for a couple of decades and I'm a fan, but the simple truth is that it's become less relevant these past years. First switching to a download only model and then progressively nagging me pretty aggressively to download my own issue (which I stopped doing because the summaries I saw in the email were of little interest to me).

Andrew, reading your editorials has always been a pleasure and you should be proud of what you accomplished.

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There is a bit of a feeling that advertising on web sites, much like SEO, is a bit of snake oil business....I agree with the op's statement-- when have you bought anything from a web advertisement anywhere? Maybe you have signed up for a service from one? But bought something? Even something very targeted.... although it does seem that "paid placement" in search -- (google search advertising) does provide some sales... Dvorak has been calling this out for some time.... advertisers seem to be catching up.

The value of the advertisement is not just "# of people who click and pay money", it is a very complex thing to analyze.

I think the irony is that the ability to see a path from view->CTR->action has severely devalued online advertising even though the theory behind it is no different from other, less introspectable forms of advertising.

In other forms of advertising, the advertisor is forced to confront the fact that the connection between advertising and purchasing is not a direct process because they can't see it anyways. They can see that they advertise and somewhere down the line they can observe a general rise in sales or brand knowledge, but they can almost never tie that to even a campaign, let alone a particular impression.

So you have this market for advertising where the advertisers can point to abysmal CTRs and say "See? I shouldn't be paying this much for such terrible action!" while still reaping the benefits of less tangible brand recognition down the road. And thus is born a race to the bottom.

Something that shouldn't be ignored is how many publishers have burned themselves by taking advantage of the technical aspects of online publishing to sell dozens of ads where print media would have sold one. It's enough to compare a magazine article to its online edition. The magazine edition might have four ads if the article spans three pages. Online, the article will span 10 with half a dozen ads on each page. These animated, aggressive ads will vie for the readers eye to the point that they will start using ad blocking software just to be able to actually read the article.

Yes, but those publishers are getting dimes, nay, pennies, compared to the print ad revenue (should say "were" in terms of print).

Publishers did not burn themselves. They were desperate for survival. If they only ran, say 3 banners through an online article they would have simply been out of business. There was nowhere else to turn for many of them as the advertising disappeared. Evolution.

You could also make the argument that publishers are getting pennies for those ads because they're running thirty of them on a page. I've done tons of ad work online, many specs have limits on how taxing the ads can be for the end user's computer not because they don't want to degrade the experience, but so they can run 10 ads on a page at once.

A few days ago: "Google Just Admitted More Than Half Of The Ads It Serves Are Never Seen": http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2ojl90/google_ju...

That is silly, so I see why /r/technology liked it.

Of course lots of ads are never seen. Lots of newspaper ads and magazine ads -- if you were to count each individual printing of the ad as its own entity -- are never seen by a human being before the thing ends up in the recycling bin.

This is completely separate from the old saying in marketing, "half my advertising budget is completely wasted, but I don't know which half." That's saying that half of all ad buys are completely worthless.

The only thing Google did wrong was to actually measure if their ads were viewable (for more than a second, mind you).

edit minor fixes

It's obviously difficult to generalize about ads and I don't think ads were the way to promote Dr. Dobbs.

My personal experience with Google AdWords (take it as an anecdote) is depressing. 10 years ago I had a real and measurable ROI using it. Fastforward a few years and I didn't receive a single customer from them until one day I turned off all my campaigns. In parallel I received many customers from our blog articles, links, etc.

There is another force against ads: AdBlock. The use of adblockers is growing, more in our field.

I don't quite follow the difference between an "online magazine" and any other content site.

But I think I see where you're going. There are a lot of ways to reach developers with ads online. And, frankly, developers are not a very good demographic for advertisers. As a group, they don't spend all that much money. (Compare to e.g. CIOs who may be in charge of million dollar IT budgets.)

"First switching to a download only model..." Downloaded issues were supplementary content. Our main delivery vehicle was the website.

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