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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

#91

Post by losteric »

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…

It's possible many ad-supported websites deserve to die... as I see it, they are economic parasites. Advertisers accept bad leads as a cost of doing business, but the cost is simply passed on to consumers.

Many low-quality news papers, TV channels, and magazines died when ad revenue shifted online - consumers did not see enough value to justify the unsubsidized rate. Others survived because consumers saw enough value to pay the higher rates. The internet isn't any different... a large chunk of the internet is spam surviving off of wasteful advertising revenue. Soon, the cruft will die off.

None of us need unlimited access to everything out there, and I don't think it's a sustainable expectation.

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

#92

Post by gwern »

dooglius wrote: post #90

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 control…

The modafinil page didn't have AdSense during the experiment, and if it had, I think the content would have not involved modafinil; Google was burned badly years ago by mega-fines for allowing greymarket pharmacies to advertise and I assume it's totally filtered them out, so any served ads would be targeted at other personal characteristics, presumably. (I also vaguely recollect trying to buy some adwords once while experimenting with advertising gwern.net pages, and the drug categories being totally out of bounds.)

During the experiment, roughly, the most popular pages were a mix: https://www.gwern.net/About#january-2017---july-2017 The top 5 were modafinil (excluded from AdSense), spaced repetition (psychology), LSD microdosing, DNB FAQ (also psychology), and "Story Of Your Life" (physics/literary criticism).

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

#94

Post by def_true_false »

init-as wrote: post #25
majani wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the biggest problem I have with Adsense. Most of the time it seems like they couldn't find an ad that fits me but their system decided to just throw me a random ad for Forex Trading or whatever. This turns their supposedly sophisticated ad system into a random generator as far as I'm concerned. They could fix this by: 1. Just showing blanks if they can't get something targeted to my preferences 2. Not allowin…

I just wanted to say that it’s actually nice not to be the only one who is harassed by forex trading ads around the web. Them and Mobile Strike are pretty much all of the ads I see. (I do have Adblock but can’t block for YouTube mobile etc.)

There are other apps for youtube. E.g. newpipe.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by zerocrates »

spc476 wrote: post #84
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 chang…

They probably determined your page-relevant term was just getting in the way of their killer machine-learning tuned strategy of showing ads for the last thing the user happened to look at.

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

#97

Post by Feniks »

smsm42 wrote: post #52

> ~60% of visitors have adblock This is much higher than I'd expect. Of course, it is a special kind of site, but still. Can we say a model is in serious trouble yet?

I'm amazed they can even tell. A lot of people who use adblocking also browse as ghost traffic that can't even be analyzed.

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

#98

Post by daveFNbuck »

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…

That $100/month is what you'd have to get every household to pay to get rid of all advertisement. Just getting rid of banner ads on websites should be a lot cheaper.

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

#99

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

That sounds like a content tax.

And is probably precisely how this should work, indexed to wealth / income.

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

#100

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Total advertising spend worldwide is $600 billion. Online is about 1/6 of that, call it $100 billion.

To a rough approximation, that's footed by the 1 billion wealthy inhabitants of the EU, US, Japan, Canada, Australian, and New Zealand. (I said rough, roll with me.)

That means that the per person costs of advertising are pretty much $100 annually online and $600 annually for all content (mostly TV). Keep in mind, those are real expenses expressed through household purchases.

(This means, by the way, that online content isn't free, you are paying for it, only, you're doing so indirectly, through advertisers.)

By contrast, total direct expenditures on print media run about $125/person in the US. (Audio/video may add to that.)

If you look at what is advertised, an awful lot is very high-ticket items. The FIRE industries (finance, insurance, real estate) were the largest chunk of spend as of a couple-three years ago. Electronics is another large segment.

The notion of some sort of universal content payments scheme, preferably indexed to wealth and income, has a great deal of economic justification. I've been exploring that for the past few years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+cont...

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