LA Times and ads

This might be worst in the news industry, but it is not uncommon on other sites too. And even without a tag manager, as a web developer, I still get requests to blindly add all sorts of scripts. Often they're requested by a marketing partner of the client, or because the client has seen something at a conference that they believe they must have.

Wherever possible, I make it clear that this cruft comes at a cost, but I cannot recall a single client being swayed by those arguments. In the case of overlap between trackers (Analytics, Facebook, etc), from the perspective of the client, they solve their "problem" in a quick request. Either it appeases the marketing company or it gives them that little extra feature they think they need but will never use.

Increasingly, it can be miserable developing for anything other than my own projects because of how much time is spent implementing bad ideas requested by other people.

No, on purpose of wanting to aupport the creatirs of the content being consumed.

It's less then pennies per view. All of those trackers also pay less than pennies per view. Basically, if you have a legit business with any ability whatsoever to make decent revenue, there's no reason to have chumboxes or paying trackers on your site.

I have been reflecting on this problem a lot over the past six months since I left the ad tech industry after four and a half years. These posts always sadden me, because I recognize the importance and value that advertising brings to web startups and the level of innovation and growth that it has enabled.

I have a hypothesis on how we can reduce the number of these types of ads, while also not harming advertisers or publishers in terms of reach and revenue.

I believe that we are in an advertising death-spiral. Sites are adding additional impression opportunities and ad placements. This is triggering higher numbers of impressions available to programmatic buyers. The additional number of available impressions is devaluing the impressions (we're flooding the market), which has led to a perpetual decrease in CPMs every year. This leads to publishers pushing higher "engagement" ads, which users just find terribly annoying, as well as more ad units. The cycle repeats, repeats, and repeats, just so both sides can "stay effective" with regards to whatever metrics they are measuring against.

My belief is that the LA times does not need N ad placements per article. They probably only need one. We don't need to junk up quality news organizations with taboola and the other "content" recommendation platforms. We quite literally need a détente.

LA Times goes down to one ad placement per article. LA Times advertiser is guaranteed viewability (high placement in the article, for example), and 100% share of voice. The "impact" of that ad increases, with the overall decrease in other "noise". The cost also goes up, but commiserate with the increased value. Both sides likely end up making / paying the same amount of money, with likely the same level of impact for the advertiser, but they reduce the pain on the user, which they should both care about deeply.

I'd like to believe this is an opportunity from a business perspective. I believe that someone could demonstrate this value, in some way, to both sides of the market. The advertiser would need fewer impressions to achieve the same level of value / impact of their ads, which also has the side benefit of reducing additional costs around TPAT tracking, analytics costs, general tracking costs, etc., which are often priced on a CPM basis (so, fewer CPMs lowers their bill). The publisher would potentially see better engagement from their users, fewer ad blocks, and a higher quality experience.

I think for the sake of newspapers and advertisers alike, some way to make this reality makes this an idea worth solving.

That in itself is an indication of something, no?