A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:03 AM UTC

daveFNbuck wrote: post #98

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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:08 AM UTC

Feniks wrote: post #50

tikhonj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's how old media has been doing it for centuries. But media is hard: you have to invest in personal relations with advertisers. New media just outsources all the hard work to Google and other big ad placers. Easier but you lose editorial control over your work.

More like "for about 150 years".

Advertising, in the modern sense, is, well, modern. You pretty much simply did not have goods to advertise (or the means to advertise them) other than for very specific items -- think classifieds rather than bulk and mass advertising.

The rise of the factory system, of transport networks, and the capacity to create far more of a good than local demand could absorb created the first modern-style advertising in about 1860. The first prominently-featured adverts were the 19th century equivalents of Viagra ads: mostly-ineffective patent medicines.

Hamilton Holt has a delightful contemporary account of this, written (and presented as a lecture, it's short) in 1909, looking back on the previous 50 years or so of publishing history. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...

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

#103

Post by Houshalter » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:32 AM UTC

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…

I think your estimate is off by more than an order of magnitude. I follow a number of large youtube channels. Many of them seem to be making more money from patreon than from ads. And patreon isn't even a true subscription model, since you can usually see the content even if you don't subscribe. And it still beats ads.

One of my favorite channels is this super niche thing that only gets about 1000-2000 views per video and makes 2 vids a month. That adds up to maybe $4-8 in ad revenue using some rough estimates of youtube's payout rate. On patreon he's making over $500 a month. Which is really respectable for such a small audience.

Online ads have never generated that much money per user and were only profitable in large quantities. Given how scummy they are and this evidence that they repel users, they should be eliminated.

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

#104

Post by dangrossman » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:38 AM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #103

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…

I think your estimate is off by more than an order of magnitude. I follow a number of large youtube channels. Many of them seem to be making more money from patreon than from ads. And patreon isn't even a true subscription model, since you can usually see the content even if you don't subscribe. And it still beats ads. One of my favorite channels is this super niche thing that only gets about 1000-2000 views per vide…

If you divide US digital ad spend in 2016 by number of US households, that's about $50/month. Same order of magnitude as my earlier guesstimate.

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

#105

Post by Houshalter » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 2:52 AM UTC

dangrossman wrote: post #104

Houshalter wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your estimate is off by more than an order of magnitude. I follow a number of large youtube channels. Many of them seem to be making more money from patreon than from ads. And patreon isn't even a true subscription model, since you can usually see the content even if you don't subscribe. And it still beats ads. One of my favorite channels is this super niche thing that only gets about 1000-2000 views per vide…

If you divide US digital ad spend in 2016 by number of US households, that's about $50/month. Same order of magnitude as my earlier guesstimate.

Sure but that's a very indirect calculation. Only a fraction of that is going to end up funneled to banner ads and the websites that run them. And that's the relevant metric; how much revenue you are losing by moving away from ads.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 3:11 AM UTC

zerocrates wrote: post #96

spc476 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by drngdds » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 3:25 AM UTC

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.

The Brave browser people are working on a weird cryptocurrency-based solution to this problem called the Basic Attention Token. Hope you don't mind being paid in some Ethereum tokens, though. https://basicattentiontoken.org/about/

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

#108

Post by Zpalmtree » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 3:45 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #100

viraptor wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

So, if I block advertising, I'm indirectly wasting the money these companies spend on me, and are paying more for products without any benefit? That's a funny thought.

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

#109

Post by floofyfloofer » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 3:56 AM UTC

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…

I think Mozilla ran the numbers a year ago and found that all the advertising on the internet only nets about ~$11/person/month. Though, hell, I'd pay 10x that to be rid of that malware vector.

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

#110

Post by 0xcde4c3db » Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 4:30 AM UTC

_8j50 wrote: post #28

I don't know how much research has been done on the subject,but personally I don't mind ads in general,I mind ads that target (stalk) me and intrusive ads. I can tolerate ads that target the page content or random ads just fine.

> I don't know how much research has been done on the subject,but personally I don't mind ads in general,I mind ads that target (stalk) me and intrusive ads.

That used to be my position. I think I still don't mind honest-to-goodness advertising: this product/vendor exists and has these features. I actually do still see this kind of ad on sites connected to electrical engineering; presumably other competitive technical product areas like photography or scientific/industrial equipment have it too. But the more I've experienced the dissonance of being hit with bursts of mainstream advertising after moving to a generally lower-advertising lifestyle (ad blockers/NoScript, cord-cutting, more judicious selection of news sources, etc.), the more distinctly I've felt the reality that we're almost a century into the general trend of "advertising" being a euphemism for psychosocial manipulation. In other words, modern advertising is for-profit propaganda. In my view, it's not enough for the media of advertising to be more passive. The technology is amplifying it, but the overall strategy is what's fundamentally exploitative. Many people think that merely by being cynical about this, they're immunizing themselves. It's tempting to think that if you study the techniques and make snarky remarks like, say, "oh, look how cool this Lexus is; if I buy it that means I'm powerful and important", then you've somehow defeated it. Make no mistake: that's just another strand in the web. The idea that the advertiser wants to push is still being normalized in your mind, even through the filter of irony.

I don't intend to be alarmist here. Humanity has just about survived a century of this crap, after all. Life goes on. Revolutions, both figurative and literal, haven't been rendered obsolete by the sheer marketing budgets of incumbents. But I think we have evolved a warped view of what qualifies as normal, honest communication.