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There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

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Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#61

Post by _rpd »

barrkel wrote: post #27

The "pivot to video" would explain why every third article I click from outside my usual haunts has an auto-play video at the top that follows me as I scroll down the page. I've reached my limit; I've started blocking video CDNs with my adblocker. If there's a video I really want to watch, I'll use a different browser.

The Disable HTML5 Autoplay plugin for Chrome still works pretty well ...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

The author has stopped maintaining the plugin though because Google is supposedly addressing the issue at the browser level.

Edit: This seems to be the recommended fix for Chrome ...

Set ...

chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

to ...

"Document user activation is required."

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#62

Post by philipkglass »

eli wrote: post #31
acdha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any examples of those profitable businesses?

Well, you can check my profile for one :) Skift is another (and if you've been following digital media for a while you may recognize its founder Rafat Ali) These are B2B examples. Consumer media is a lot harder because you have to figure out a way to carve out a niche audience that is attractive to advertisers, but I think it's possible. And I think success is a lot more likely if you bootstrap something rather than…

Just popping in to say I read Utility Dive frequently. I had no idea anyone involved with it was on HN. I'm not an industry professional, just somebody who's really interested in energy issues.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#63

Post by shostack »

marrone12 wrote: post #28
eli wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you determine that most clicks are bots? Savvy marketers aren't measuring clicks, they're measuring conversions and they tie their marketing spend to sales leads and to revenue generated. Ads that generate clicks but no sales don't last long.

You're coming at this from a SaaS point of view. Imagine if you're a rather large brand like Fedex. You can't tie your digital ads directly to a conversion because the conversion happens offline. But their advertising department is supposed to make it seem like they're spending money and driving "brand awareness". So getting fake clicks, fake ad video views -- all of that can get reported up so they can make themselv…

I think you'd benefit from researching a bit more around what major brands do from a measurement standpoint. With the benefit of that much data, you can do some fairly accurate econometric/media mix modeling and get a solid read on lift for core metrics that they've invested a lot in to understand their impact on the bottom line.

There is absolutely garbage inventory mixed in, and lots of solutions to try to minimize the impact of that, but to assume that these major brands don't know how this all works is naive.

Further, just as an example, both Google and FB have very solid options for importing offline conversions which are relatively easy to map back to an audience ID of some sort.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#64

Post by eli »

shostack wrote: post #63
marrone12 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're coming at this from a SaaS point of view. Imagine if you're a rather large brand like Fedex. You can't tie your digital ads directly to a conversion because the conversion happens offline. But their advertising department is supposed to make it seem like they're spending money and driving "brand awareness". So getting fake clicks, fake ad video views -- all of that can get reported up so they can make themselv…

I think you'd benefit from researching a bit more around what major brands do from a measurement standpoint. With the benefit of that much data, you can do some fairly accurate econometric/media mix modeling and get a solid read on lift for core metrics that they've invested a lot in to understand their impact on the bottom line. There is absolutely garbage inventory mixed in, and lots of solutions to try to minimize…

As a contrived example: it's easy to geotarget digital ads. So focus them on just Chicago and see if sales originating in Chicago go up or down vs other cities.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#65

Post by downandout »

He seems to entirely overlook native advertising. I know of a couple of decent sized businesses ($50mm+ annual revenue) that depend almost entirely on native advertising, because Google/Facebook ads in their niches are highly competitive, and tend to not be ROI positive. Certain niches on Google and Facebook are dominated by startups that are willing and able to lose investor money on negative ROI ads in pursuit of growth. They drive the bids up, and this creates a situation where existing companies and startups that are not flush with investor cash must look elsewhere for advertising that is profitable.

Further, Google and Facebook have an insane number of rules about how and what companies can advertise, and therefore there are billions of ad dollars that do not and will not ever enter into their coffers. These are not just in scammy niches either...you’d be amazed at many of the ads that get rejected by Facebook and Google. This pushes additional billions in ad money outside of their ecosystems.

As long as investors are willing to fund losing ad campaigns, and Google and Facebook keep increasing the number and breadth of rules that result in an ever increasing volume of ad rejections, there will be publishers and alternative ad networks that can enjoy vast amounts of revenue that gets pushed to the fringes by these forces. They just have to position themselves properly.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#66

Post by majormajor »

lsd5you wrote: post #4

There is a perception in right wing circles that this is also related to trumpism, after all this crash is happening with the stock market at an all time high. A lot of these publications are at the 'progressive' end of the spectrum and they may have misread the market, even for their core readers. Specifically the media (and in particular digital media's) response seems to have been one of all out activism against h…

> People don't explicitly want to be told what to believe.

The idea that "telling people what to believe" is a phenomenon unique to one side of the political spectrum is absurd. What's been the most watched cable news network in recent years?

"People don't want to be told they're wrong" is a more realistic claim, but a very different one.

But this is happening to non-political media too, so the idea that it's politically driven at all is probably dreamy-eyed wish-fulfillment.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#67

Post by jabretti »

reaperducer wrote: post #41
Jaruzel wrote: post #7

Relevant... I got told a few days ago that: "Buzzfeed writers have to generate at least 1 article per day. There is no minimum limit on words on the article, and the topic can be anything (within reason)." Once I knew this, the prevalence of low-quality Buzzfeed links all over the web suddenly made sense.

One per day? I had someone at one of Vox's regional properties tell me they had to do 12 a day (combination of local and national)! One per day seems pretty light. TV reporters in medium and small markets are usually required to turn out two a day (one package, one VOSOT). Radio reporters sometimes five or six or more, depending on market size and whether they're unionized.

Cranking out one buzzfeed-grade article a day doesn't seem like much work.

I'm pretty sure I've already put more thought into this comment than they put into most of their articles.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#68

Post by o_nate »

indubitable wrote: post #52

A couple of weeks back there was a headline about a site surreptitiously using visitor's hardware to mine some form of crypto. People were upset, but it made me wonder.. why isn't this a viable business model? Crypto mining in lieu of advertisers would realign interest between content producer and content consumer - the person who reads your articles begins to be your customer again, instead of the companies advertis…

This is actually a great idea. Worthy of a post of its own.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#69

Post by x0x0 »

tboyd47 wrote: post #3

I agree, but my question is, why hasn't the crash happened yet? Doesn't everyone know most clicks are by bots?

Advertisers can pretty accurately track and price campaigns; if clicks are inflated 50% by fraud, it comes out in what they pay. Even if not in this round, then in the next. Adwords advertisers can modify their campaigns extremely frequently, but even display ads are generally sold at most on 3 month contracts. If, as DSP buying ads for a campaign, you don't hit your CPA target, then you don't get new campaigns. Now legit publishers definitely get screwed, but that's kind of ironic since the entire idea of adsense is to screw good publishers by allowing advertisers to target customers wherever it's cheapest.

tl;dr It doesn't matter that much to advertisers because fraud washes out in the pricing.

Re: There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It

#70

Post by davidwitt415 »

_rpd wrote: post #61
barrkel wrote: post #27

The "pivot to video" would explain why every third article I click from outside my usual haunts has an auto-play video at the top that follows me as I scroll down the page. I've reached my limit; I've started blocking video CDNs with my adblocker. If there's a video I really want to watch, I'll use a different browser.

The Disable HTML5 Autoplay plugin for Chrome still works pretty well ... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto... The author has stopped maintaining the plugin though because Google is supposedly addressing the issue at the browser level. Edit: This seems to be the recommended fix for Chrome ... Set ... chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy to ... "Document user activation is required."

Neither option works on SI.com, one of the worst/typical autoplay offenders. Hopefully, the Google 2018 fix will really take care of this.
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