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A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

gwern.net

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Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#81

Post by FridgeSeal »

tikhonj wrote: post #33
_8j50 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user,I am most offended by ads that target me. I would rather see a completely unrelatable ad. It feels like learning new information that way,as opposed to being stalked and preyed upon.

The other option is to target the ads to the publication . As long as the publication is on a niche topic or geographically localized, you can choose ads that will likely interest people (local restaurants) without needing to track them. Tracking is only necessary when the ad venue is incredibly broad across topics and geography.

As someone who used to work trafficking ads and spends a lot of time blocking them myself, I'm of the opinion that this is the approach to take.

ReadTheDocs and sites like BikeRadar are my favourite examples: If I go to a bike site, I expect the ads I see to be about bike stuff. If I'm on a technical site (like Stack Overflow or ReadTheDocs) I expect to see ads about related technical topics.

Unfortunately the advertising industry has gone down the route of hyper-invasive, user-data focused advertising, for what I consider to be very little benefit to either publishers or users. The only people who benefit are those who pedal the tech that enables this market.

With all the ML tools available to us now, I'm not sure why we couldn't build tools that accurately match ad content to site content. You don't need to invasively track users users this way either, because you only ever need to be concerned with the topic of the site/article and not who's seeing it.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#82

Post by bartread »

hanbura wrote: post #14
katzgrau wrote: post #3

As someone who has founded and runs an adserver for a living (we deal only with legitimate publications, nothing sketchy), I found this thought provoking. Since I deal mostly in niche/local advertising, I might have a unique perspective. It turns out that the more relatable a banner ad is, the less offended the reader is. That may sound obvious, and it probably is. But the general effect is that users engage with and…

I think a most of the problems with ads are just caused by how Google and other big players run online advertising. Somewhere along the way "let's add an image of some company our readers might be interested in" turned into "let's serve a huge Javascript that perceivably slows the browser in order to serve an ad from the highest bidder who might or might not run a criminal enterprise. Also make sure the ads show off…

^^^This.

I run Adsense on https://arcade.ly. The pages are heavy anyway because they implement games, and much of the payload is music and, to a lesser extent, sound effects. As an experiment I tried loading the pages without music and was nothing short of appalled by the amount of crap Adsense downloads.

Thing is, it's not Adsense itself that's the problem: it's the adverts themselves and the lack of control/moderation Google chooses to exert over ad providers. They serve up tons - I mean really a lot - of JavaScript, which tries to track you in N different ways, all so they can display a hyperlinked image with the most basic of animations and mouse over effects. This payload, often running to well over 1MB, measurably slows load and execution performance on the page.

The creepiness infuriates me, but it's the overall shittiness of the development practice that produces so much bloat for so little value I find most offensive. I mean these people go in to work, half-ass throwing together a bunch of code and assets in the worst way imaginable, and then carelessly spooge their effluent all over the web... and then they have the audacity to start whingeing about people running ad-blockers. What do they expect?

My site gets next to no traffic at the moment but if/when it's grown a bit I'm going to start looking at non-ad ways to earn money from it. I'm even considering ditching them at the moment to see if that might help grown traffic in itself.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#83

Post by dangrossman »

badestrand wrote: post #51
buro9 wrote: post #44

What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that: 1. Banners hurt unless they are relevant 2. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers 3. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every metric 4. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re-writing existing links…

Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.

It wouldn't work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100/month per household, and you'd need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can't replace that with some $10/month subscription even if everyone paid it.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#84

Post by spc476 »

buro9 wrote: post #44

What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that: 1. Banners hurt unless they are relevant 2. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers 3. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every metric 4. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re-writing existing links…

Up until a week ago, I had an Amazon banner on my blog. When I set it up (about a decade ago), you had the ability to specify a search term in the URL of the banner, and I used this. For each post, I would have a targeted search term to use to display the Amazon banner.

Sometime in the past month or two Amazon got rid of that feature and so I was only getting a generic Amazon sales banner. I'm not sure why they changed, but they did, and I removed the banner. Thanks Amazon.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#85

Post by lactinfo »

dangrossman wrote: post #83
badestrand wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.

It wouldn't work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100/month per household, and you'd need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can't replace that with some $10/month subscription even if eve…

Well it certainly won’t work with that attitude.

Advertising makes me regret the internet.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#86

Post by lactinfo »

katzgrau wrote: post #3

As someone who has founded and runs an adserver for a living (we deal only with legitimate publications, nothing sketchy), I found this thought provoking. Since I deal mostly in niche/local advertising, I might have a unique perspective. It turns out that the more relatable a banner ad is, the less offended the reader is. That may sound obvious, and it probably is. But the general effect is that users engage with and…

What the hell is a relatable advertisement?

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#87

Post by spc476 »

kzrdude wrote: post #32
_8j50 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user,I am most offended by ads that target me. I would rather see a completely unrelatable ad. It feels like learning new information that way,as opposed to being stalked and preyed upon.

I would love to see more ads that instead target the content of the page. When I'm reading about machine learning, it should be books close to that topic, and other related things. I can't believe little that happens.

I used to to that with Amazon. About a decade ago, I added an Amazon banner, and the link included a search term. So I would add an appropriate search term (related to the top blog entry on the page, which is where the Amazon banner appeared). Sometime in the past few months, Amazon removed that and only allows generic sales banners to be presented.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#88

Post by viraptor »

dangrossman wrote: post #83
badestrand wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.

It wouldn't work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100/month per household, and you'd need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can't replace that with some $10/month subscription even if eve…

Something's not right with that equation. You're implying that on average, each household is spending over $1000 per month on things they get via the online advertising that they would otherwise not get at all.

And that's just not realistic. One-off purchases, maybe. Sustained 1k/hh/mth avg - I'd love to see a proof of that.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#89

Post by dangrossman »

viraptor wrote: post #88
dangrossman wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100/month per household, and you'd need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can't replace that with some $10/month subscription even if eve…

Something's not right with that equation. You're implying that on average, each household is spending over $1000 per month on things they get via the online advertising that they would otherwise not get at all. And that's just not realistic. One-off purchases, maybe. Sustained 1k/hh/mth avg - I'd love to see a proof of that.

Households do spend >$1000 per month on consumer goods/services (food, clothes, personal care items, etc). Those companies do spend >10% on marketing. I'm not sure what portion of it is spent online, which is what you'd need the subscription to replace.

There's no implication that every dollar they spend on marketing directly translates into $10 of new spending "that they would otherwise not get at all".

Much of it is brand spending. Procter & Gamble is the world's largest advertiser, and the goal of their ads is to make sure you keep picking up Tide every time you're in the detergent aisle. Coca-Cola's ads aren't trying to get you to buy $10 more of soda than last week, just to keep soda on your shopping list every week. Those ad dollars would need to be replaced by the subscription if you're going to remove the ads but keep compensation for the websites the same.

Re: A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

#90

Post by dooglius »

The content is characterized as "highly technical longform static content in a minimalist layout optimized for fast loading & rendering catering to Anglophone STEM-types in the USA", which is definitely true, but I think there's an important subset not mentioned. According to http://www.gwern.net/ the most popular three articles on the site are about darknet drug markets, and #4 and #5 are reviews of specific controlled substances in the US. I don't know what the ads for these pages looked like, but here's an example from a Google search for "modafinil" in incognito mode with my adblocker turned off: https://i.imgur.com/3dRssOy.png ["the silk road" and "lsd microdosing" didn't turn up any ads, but it's possible Google does more filtering on its own site than on others... I couldn't easily find any LSD review sites that used AdSense for a fair comparison]

If I saw an ad like that in a banner at the top of the page, it's going to cause an immediate, visceral reaction: the site is sketchy, maybe trying to scam me, and any content is going to have a big conflict of interest. To be fair, since I use an ad-blocker, I'm probably more ad-sensitive than the sample set... but who hasn't gotten their fair share of similar email spam before?

The CSVs don't have page information, unfortunately, but I'd expect most of the harmful effect comes from the drug-related pages.

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