Contenture - an anti-ad network?
contenture.com
Contenture - an anti-ad network?
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#2People want to support the sites they depend on. Contenture makes this possible. Contenture users pay into the system, their money is distributed to the Contenture-enabled sites that they visit.
Anyone who thought ad revenues were low as they are should wait to see how really low tip revenues can get.
Disclaimer: I run an ad network :-)
Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#3 Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to "fixing" advertising. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't
work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law
was passed.)
(X) Advertisers will not stand for it
(X) The advertising industry will not go away anytime soon
(X) Unintrusive, legitimate advertising would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X) It won't reach critical mass
( ) It will make things better for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Google will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from advertisers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many existing sites cannot afford to lose existing deals
(X) Users won't pay for it
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of a centrally controlling authority
( ) People who will ignore it
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of advertising
(X) Huge existing software investment in advertising
(X) All the other sites that will still have advertising
(X) Extreme profitability of regular advertising
(X) Trustworthiness of provider
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of webmasters
(X) Dishonesty on the part of webmasters themselves
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Paying for stuff sucks
( ) Not paying for stuff sucks
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with existing business models
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(X) I don't want a third-party tracking my site visits
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#4Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to "fixing" advertising. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.) (X) Advertisers will not stand for it (X) The advertising industry will not go aw…
I'm sorry this is necessary, but yes, it's a bad attempt at humor based on the "why your anti-spam proposal won't work" meme of many years ago: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#5FYI, Contenture is about a lot more than ads. It's also the dead simplest way to create premium features for your site with very very little work.
Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#6I got an advertisement from these folks in my inbox this morning because I pay for Clicky. (Totally worth it, by the way.)
Here's the fundamental problem with this advertising venture: everybody in the ecosystem freeloads on the site that makes the "sale". (Convinces a user to pay $X for access to the content on that site "and by the way get access to all these other sites, too!") This makes a lot of sense for, e.g., Paypal.
Quick aside on how Paypal works: everybody else in the ecosystem freeloads on eBay, because eBay is far and away the #1 source of Paypal accounts and every marginal Paypal account helps every other Paypal merchant. However, a user signing up for a Paypal account in your checkout funnel sucks for conversion. Ideally, you'd want to get new accounts generated by other businesses but never have to pay the "new account" tax yourself. However, since Paypal makes a cut of all transactions and eBay makes a huge direct profit for every additional account they sign up, it makes sense for eBay to grossly subsidize the rest of the ecosystem. (Plus, they can control it such that you can't play in their ecosystem without paying the new account tax.)
OK, now take this to content businesses: remember, everyone freeloads off the site that wins the account -- you don't have to convince an existing account to open their wallet again, you merely need to attract their eyeball. But users don't perceive value from "Get access to X... and, by the way, a bunch of other sites you might not care about and we won't list right now". They're willing to pay for X. If you're X, where X is presumably something massive like the New York Times or deeply meaningful to users like, I don't know, HN would be, and you know people will pay you money for your content, why the heck would you offer to split that money with other people who are not sharing appreciable amounts of money with you? (Because you're massively bigger and better monetized than them, you directly generate far more accounts in the system -- losing money, brand value, and user attention on each -- than you receive from, e.g., my site which has 50k visits a month.)
Ecosystems based on freeloading don't work unless the equilibrium is such that all players benefit from the freeloading. In this system, the players which you need to enable the freeloading are greatly disadvantaged by it. Sucks to be them. Accordingly, they won't sign up, and without them there is no ecosystem to speak of.
Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#7I got an advertisement from these folks in my inbox this morning because I pay for Clicky. (Totally worth it, by the way.) Here's the fundamental problem with this advertising venture: everybody in the ecosystem freeloads on the site that makes the "sale". (Convinces a user to pay $X for access to the content on that site "and by the way get access to all these other sites, too!") This makes a lot of sense for, e.g.,…
I think their strongest conversion point would be getting rid of adds. If I realized that a few of the sites I visit almost daily and get linked to me regularly would all magically have no adds if I signed up for a service, I might do it. It's not that I'm paying for a service from a website, I'm paying to get rid of an anti-service: the ads.
All that said, I have NoScript, AdBlockPlus, and RemoveItPermanently installed on almost all my computers.
Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#8I got an advertisement from these folks in my inbox this morning because I pay for Clicky. (Totally worth it, by the way.) Here's the fundamental problem with this advertising venture: everybody in the ecosystem freeloads on the site that makes the "sale". (Convinces a user to pay $X for access to the content on that site "and by the way get access to all these other sites, too!") This makes a lot of sense for, e.g.,…
The idea is that you get paid based on how many people visit your site. There should probably be significant bonuses based on sign ups coming from/through your site.
Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#9I got an advertisement from these folks in my inbox this morning because I pay for Clicky. (Totally worth it, by the way.) Here's the fundamental problem with this advertising venture: everybody in the ecosystem freeloads on the site that makes the "sale". (Convinces a user to pay $X for access to the content on that site "and by the way get access to all these other sites, too!") This makes a lot of sense for, e.g.,…
The idea is that you get paid based on how many people visit your site. There should probably be significant bonuses based on sign ups coming from/through your site.
So imagine I'm the New York Times. OK, I can charge people $1 to read the NYT. If I was Joe Shmoe, my revenue share from that $1 would have been fifty cents. However, since I'm the freaking NYT and generating more accounts than everyone else on the system, the network bumps my payout to 80 cents. Whee!
Wait, absense of whee. Its my content that was worth the dollar to the user. Why should I give twenty cents to Joe Shmoe?
And without the NYT on board, Joe Shmoe's Blog About Things You're Not Quite Willing To Pay For But Are Glad Exist On The Internet is screwed.
Re: Contenture - an anti-ad network?
#10People want to support the sites they depend on. Contenture makes this possible. Contenture users pay into the system, their money is distributed to the Contenture-enabled sites that they visit. Anyone who thought ad revenues were low as they are should wait to see how really low tip revenues can get. Disclaimer: I run an ad network :-)
What's your ad network?