11–20 of 29 posts
I’ve worked around the ad ecosystem for a long time as a media buying agency, then an ad network, then a publisher. I think this article is spot on. Few understand the iron grasp Google has on the ecosystem. Soon they are changing the model to allow for fair competition, but thus far Google AdX has had a massive advantage by having the first and last price in every bid request. They get to see what other ad networks…
Click the source link, and it’s an article about how companies are wasting money on data scientists when they only need data analysts, contradictory to the point made by primary article. This was an intriguing article, but I could not continue reading after noticing this.
I’ve worked around the ad ecosystem for a long time as a media buying agency, then an ad network, then a publisher. I think this article is spot on. Few understand the iron grasp Google has on the ecosystem. Soon they are changing the model to allow for fair competition, but thus far Google AdX has had a massive advantage by having the first and last price in every bid request. They get to see what other ad networks…
If AdX was more open, how do you think the market would change?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The richest people are the ones who advertisers really want to reach (in the article, the hypothetical beer ad sells at $2 CPM vs the hypothetical private jet ad at a $2000 CPM). At the same time, the richest people are the ones who can afford to pay whatever subscription fee FB or Google would charge. I don't think that there is a lack of demand, it's just that the people who make up that demand create an adverse se…
It's not really the same thing you're talking about at all, but I think there's also an interesting conflict of this type between where the largest sites are getting their user growth from now, and the users that are most valuable as advertising targets to them. The larger sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are pretty close to saturation in North America and a lot of other English-speaking countries. There just aren't m…
> Consumers can pay for ad-free video subscription services like Spotify Premium or Hulu—why can’t they in search or social networking? Why are these markets stuck? The article has very pragmatic observatiosn but this is not one of them. This won't work, people won't pay with money for what they can easily pay with their targetting data. Private data is worthless in any other context than advertising, there is no opp…
This is absolutely correct. Not only is an individual's private data nearly worthless, but they can protect it for free simply by using the Brave browser or other adblocking/tracking solutions. People often claim that they would pay for web content if it were somehow easier or if micropayments worked better or something. I'm not sure that I believe them.
You don't have to take their word that people would pay. They already are paying. Millions[1] of people go out of their way[2] to pay creators monthly or per-work.
However, a lot of that "web content" needs to realize the actual value of their content might be ~$0. Advertising distorted the market; a lot of people were able to extract revenue greater than the actual "market value" of their content.
[1] https://graphtreon.com/patreon-stats
[2] While Patreon isn't very hard, having to take the extra step of vising (and maybe making an account) a 3rd party service is not a proper "micropayment" system. The goal of micropayments is to make trivial to immediately pay for something without any extra friction (perhaps a button/whatever in the browser to send a tip/donation, no need to worry about Paypal/Patreon/etc)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely correct. Not only is an individual's private data nearly worthless, but they can protect it for free simply by using the Brave browser or other adblocking/tracking solutions. People often claim that they would pay for web content if it were somehow easier or if micropayments worked better or something. I'm not sure that I believe them.
> I'm not sure that I believe them. You don't have to take their word that people would pay. They already are paying. Millions[1] of people go out of their way[2] to pay creators monthly or per-work. However, a lot of that "web content" needs to realize the actual value of their content might be ~$0. Advertising distorted the market; a lot of people were able to extract revenue greater than the actual "market value"…
If people are spending time on your site, you are providing value to them (excluding scams, of course). It's never 0.
> Advertising distorted the market; a lot of people were abl
It did not. The percentage of GDP that companies spend in advertising is historically the same for more than 100 years. What happened with the internet is that Google and later FB progressively sucked up ALL the profits, leaving literally scraps to publishers. And over time they are eating more and more value from publishers because all their competitors have vanished (there is currently NO competitor to adsense). Publishers are seing their ad CPMs being lower , despite the fact that online audiences are growing fast, and the shift to online ads has accelerated explosively in the past few years.
Patreon and subscriptions have their place, but they are not scalable. Users will revolt if they have to pay 30 yearly subscriptions for reading 30 articles , and are forced to pass from an spanish inquisition to unsubscribe. Subscriptions can also be bad for the quality of content: If creators try to appeal to their patrons/subscribers instead of trying to reach as wide audiences as possible, they tend to become more partisan and biased ; you get what you incentivize.
micropayments would indeed be far better especially if they were anonymous, fire-and-forget payments. crypto payments would be ideal for that but its not gonna happen because they are untaxable
> Consumers can pay for ad-free video subscription services like Spotify Premium or Hulu—why can’t they in search or social networking? Why are these markets stuck? The article has very pragmatic observatiosn but this is not one of them. This won't work, people won't pay with money for what they can easily pay with their targetting data. Private data is worthless in any other context than advertising, there is no opp…
The richest people are the ones who advertisers really want to reach (in the article, the hypothetical beer ad sells at $2 CPM vs the hypothetical private jet ad at a $2000 CPM). At the same time, the richest people are the ones who can afford to pay whatever subscription fee FB or Google would charge. I don't think that there is a lack of demand, it's just that the people who make up that demand create an adverse se…
> The richest people are the ones who advertisers really want to reach (in the article, the hypothetical beer ad sells at $2 CPM vs the hypothetical private jet ad at a $2000 CPM)
Rubbish. The 1000x $2 eyeballs is definitely worth money to the beer sellers, independently to the 1x "$2000" eyeball for the private jet advertiser (ignoring profit margin etc). Note, from the article: "The private jet ad might sell at a $200 CPM as opposed to the $2 CPM beer ad targeted to an anonymous user" not sure why you changed value to 2k.
“That 22-year-old communications major has had to make way for data scientists, mathematicians, and computer programmers who, behind the scenes, use statistics, calculus, and linear algebra to optimize advertising campaigns, by micro-targeting users and constantly tweaking algorithms.” Click the source link, and it’s an article about how companies are wasting money on data scientists when they only need data analysts…
Earlier, the article explains pretty well how tracking increases the CPMs that publishers can achieve. In the author's example, cross-site tracking increases CPMs by 200%.
This seems like a benefit to the "health of the wider news ecosystem". If the author believes Google/Facebook increase the pie for publisher, why then say that they "extract from independent publishers"?