Ask HN: How Can Ads Not Suck?

Frequently on HN we get a lot of people who are great at building stuff but fall when it comes to finding and growing a userbase.

We then have people that are great at developing a community, have a popular niche blog or forum, and are itching to monetize their community.

Serving ads to solve this problem is like strip-mining for gold - ridiculous sediment to gold ratio.

So what if we concentrated on the affiliate model. Rather than serving ads to your community, you vet actual products and services that your community would actually use and genuinely endorse the product openly. You could run a drop-in type of "marketplace page" for your endorsements. It would be clear to your community that you receive (large) commissions on these sales, but I reason happy users would want to help your site. I'm talking 50%+ commissions so you can easily profit share in terms of offering a better price than they'd pay going directly anyway.

For product and service providers, I can't see a downside. They pay only from actual sales. The product is seen in a positive light (endorsed) rather than overlooked as an ad. And product providers could/should work closely to community moderators to iterate on their product.

As of now this seems like wishful thinking I know, but this could definitely be worked out, and provided it was dead-easy to get started from both ends, it's worth testing.

Make dropping in an affiliate marketplace easy for content providers. And make revenue sharing, management, and tracking easy for product providers. Develop community around connecting the two in a vetted environment. Profit off transaction fees.

Cluetrain Manifesto explained it more than a decade ago: markets are conversations. The flipside to that: conversations are markets. So if you're filling the whole world with conversational media, you're turning everything into a market.

However:

Make dropping in an affiliate marketplace easy for content providers. And make revenue sharing, management, and tracking easy for product providers.

This already exists. :-) Both through the reputable world of Amazon (et al) and the disreputable (or less-reputable) world of Clickbank (et al), this is all a done deal and already was a done deal several years ago. The tech is simple: cookies and HTTP redirects.

So this is two fold, you remove the ads that don't work (so you don't annoy your audience), which in turn creates a more potent advertising experience for vendors which makes that real estate more attractive.

The trick is not letting every dog through the door and keeping some class.

If there was some kind of nonprofit "respectful advertising alliance" that enforced consumer-friendly practices and provided a whitelist to import into adblock plus, I might use it. It would be hard to define what is consumer friendly and enforce the rules, though.

The only site I've disable adblock on is Reddit. This is because their ads use inside jokes and are sometimes humorous and always non-intrusive.

I don't see what is so nice about Google ads. They look crappy on most sites and are rarely useful in my experience. Also not a fan of Google's tracking with adwords.