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A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

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

#111

Post by rtpg »

Houshalter wrote: post #105
dangrossman wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On a first order that's right: We don't need all the ad people now that there's no ads.

But then we have to consider that 95% of the costs/fees for running ad networks would still be needed for cost-sharing models too. You still need third-party JS.

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

#112

Post by Antrikshy »

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…

How do you have experience running hundreds of forums? :O

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

#113

Post by colechristensen »

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.

Or better, slight variations on the most recent purchase

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

#114

Post by prawn »

bartread wrote: post #82
hanbura wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/modera…

I don't remember it being like this before they tied it in with DoubleClick?

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

#115

Post by dredmorbius »

Zpalmtree wrote: post #108
dredmorbius wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're also avoiding the inherent manipulation of advertising itself.

But yes, the dynamics are a tad bent.

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

#116

Post by techdragon »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #81
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.

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 advert…

We could build these things, but part of the "advertising host" optimisation metrics is "time to ad display" so the algorithms in use are frequently "deliberately dumb" for reasons of optimising the time involved in deciding what advertising should be displayed.

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

#117

Post by jefozabuss »

Antrikshy wrote: post #112
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…

How do you have experience running hundreds of forums? :O

Step 1: Run hundreds of forums

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

#118

Post by spc476 »

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.

If it was a banner of products related to previous purchases, okay, I can see that. But the banner was just a generic "Shop at Amazon!" Lame.

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

#119

Post by sdenton4 »

techdragon wrote: post #116
FridgeSeal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 advert…

We could build these things, but part of the "advertising host" optimisation metrics is "time to ad display" so the algorithms in use are frequently "deliberately dumb" for reasons of optimising the time involved in deciding what advertising should be displayed.

Somehow, televisions had the miraculous ability to display content-targeted ads with no user knowledge and zero latency...

It's much easier to target the publication than the individual user.

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

#120

Post by Freak_NL »

pault wrote: post #63
magicmikexxl wrote: post #9

There are ways to have comments that are a lot less awful than Disqus.

I don't like Disqus mostly because the UX is clunky. Are there other things people dislike about it?

Being tracked by a single third party on every site that uses it comes to mind.
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