How Web Advertising May Go 229
Anti-Globalism sends us to Ars Technica for Jon Stokes's musing on the falling value of Web advertising. Stokes put forward the outlying possibility — not a prediction — that ad rates could fall by 40% before turning up again, if they ever do. "A web page, in contrast, is typically festooned with hyperlinked visual objects that fall all over themselves in competing to take you elsewhere immediately once you're done consuming whatever it is that you came to that page for. So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention. ... We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV, and, most importantly, millennia to build business models based on scarcity. In contrast, our collective effort to monetize post-scarcity digital media have only just begun."
More intrusive ads for the same revenue? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I fear is that due to this, websites will end up having to host more intrusive ads (interstitials, the whole website being a Flash object that demands not just Flash enabled but the saving of shared objects) for the same money, as well as more code to try to block ad blocking programs (which makes it worse long term as people go elsewhere for similar content.)
Even now, a good number of Web forums will insta-ban someone just on the mention of Adblock and NoScript because the sites are so desparate for revenue.
Long term, I wonder if the solution is a page click clearinghouse, where people pay a central subscription center (in return for no ads and other membership benefits to all subscriber websites) which pays websites by how many pages that user browses from their account. Essentially, similar to how Slashdot does its subscriptions, except with member sites getting paid per view.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Web ads have themselves to blame (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried to let the model work, but after they finally started using Flash tricks to display pop-ups, I finally used the "nuclear option". Whats that? The hosts file. I call it the nuclear option because it takes out unobtrusive ads along with the nasty ones. I really didn't want to do it, but the web advertising industry left me no choice.
If major web sites ever decide to adopt a code of ethics, whereby additional window spawning, interstitials, and other obtrusive ads are barred, I'll stop using hosts.
Really, it worked fine for dead tree print guys, there's no reason it can't work for you. I don't even mind cookies. It was actually kind of cool when Yahoo started showing me ads for IC chips and network cards. Maybe they're still trying to do that, but I'll never know; because some worthless X-10 popup weenie is being blocked by my hosts file.
Get it? Is ANYBODY listening?
Re:Web ads have themselves to blame (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Stuff like this encourages people to install ad blockers. Back when ads were un-intrusive.. most people didn't bother with ad blockers. Now though.. browsing the web without some kind of blocker is an experience in pain... and unfortunately the nice ads that don't annoy users get blocked along with everything else.
What we really need are "annoying ad blockers". That would gives sites an incentive to use less obtrusive adds, which would be less likely to be blocked.
The effects of ad blockers that block everything is to encourage advertorials and other sneaky ways to get past them, most of which are worse than the original ads.
*Facepalm* (Score:2, Insightful)
Lots of confusion about terminology.
Half the people here didn't understand the article, the other half believe it was about something else based on the summary.
This was about the reduction of traditional advertising budgets (a rehash of stats) with a non-sequitor on how it might affect advertising online (with no stats).
Did they even think to mention that the money has simply shifted from print/tv media to online?
No, this is largely a attempt at fear-mongering about the economy.
Web ads are getting killed....by my FF extensions (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know how many different extensions and add-on installs I've added to FireFox but I know off the top of my head that the overwhelming majority of them are designed specifically to eliminate or block advertisements.
And by advertisements I am not just limiting the scope to pop-up ads, but google ads, banners, and ad sponsored links and polls.
Any image that is from an ad shows up 404, every pop-up is blocked, and any link to an ad shows up 404 including sites that redirect to advertisements.
The less ads the better the internet experience is. I am not sympathetic at all to advertising and spam-marketing companies when there revenue falls.
more suppliers means lower price (Score:2, Insightful)
Audience attention is still scarce -- the Internet hasn't changed this.
Print, radio and TV all had high fixed costs. As a result, the number of advertising space suppliers was low. When suppliers -- in this case, websites -- increase, supplier power decreases relative to buyer power. Prices fall.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
I run a few websites with services for certain groups of people. I support these websites with ads.
You see, as a webmaster, I basically have two options. After I developed the site for free in my spare time (it was fun!), I have to keep it running. This includes writing content, updating stuff, managing the user database (one of the sites has over 200.000 users). Which I also do in my spare time because it's still fun and doesn't cost me money.
That's not everything, though. At the end of every month, my hoster sends me a bill for each of my websites. Those bills are between 100$ and 250$ for each of those sites.
Frankly, while spending my spare time building websites is enjoyable, spending 500$-1000$ a month (!) to keep them running, is not.
I rely on people to click my ads. I place my ads carefully so they don't interrupt users reading, I blacklist bad ads and I only run AdSense ads. Currently, the revenue is about 20% more than what I have to pay for the servers. However, if 50% of my users would block ads or simply not click on them, I would have to shut down my websites.
Bottom line: Ads are a great way to fund websites run by small businesses and one-man-shows. If you think those websites are unnecessary and the internet would be better off without them and only big businesses should have the right to have a website, by all means block the ads!
Clarification: I do use Firefox with Adblock but I allow AdSense ads and ads from a few other publishers I trust enough not to show some ugly flash overlays/popunders/music playing ads etc. I also whitelist all websites I visit regularly where the ads don't bother me.
Re:Web ads are getting killed....by my FF extensio (Score:5, Insightful)
(And, I'd actually use Chrome if I could BLOCK THE DAMN ADS!!! Who cares if Chrome renders this well and/or is faster... CAN IT BLOCK ADS??, No?... OK! Fine... So, where's my FF icon? )
Therefore I use FireFox 3.x with NoScript, AdBlock Pro, and Flashblock installed...
(Sure, I find myself whitelisting certain sites often... but that is the way it should be!)
Try reading certain sites with IE7 at netbook resolutions and you will love FF with the ad killing plugins/add-ons....
Re:Anyone actually BUY anything because of web ads (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been on the other side: setting up Google ads for two small companies. In one case, it did increase the web-traffic, but did not result in a single sale. In the other case, it has resulted in sales - but the total effect was very minimal.
This was with Google ads - which I suspect are among the most effective, because they are generally relevant to what the person was searching for. Even so, the results were marginal at best.
Web advertising would be more effective if there were less of it. Unfortunately, dropping prices mean dropping revenue, which will probably cause some sites to add even more adverts. Resulting in even less value, further price and revenue drops, and a vicious cycle is begun.
Even though all attempts to date have failed, I still think an effective micropayment system is the right answer...
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and the article is total bullcrap
Rule for reading any headline of the form "[noun phrase] may [verb phrase]". Always mentally add "but almost certainly won't." The headline will almost certainly be based on something like a 99th percentile, to make the headline seem dramatic.
Re:International Nature of the Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop being so melodramatic please. Your make it sound like that if I don't look at 50 web advertisements in a day your gonna blend a cute little kitten.
I hate to point this out to you, but if you had a website that was supporting five kids and fifty little other kids in Africa and my eyeballs made all the difference each month ... well then fuck it. Seriously. Fuck the whole thing and I don't care. Let them starve. I don't give a fucking shit. If I could insure world peace by having my nuts hit with a ball peen hammer 10 times a day I might consider it, but I won't do the same just to allow some web site owners the ability to keep doing what they are doing. Yes, I do equate web advertisements with getting my balls traumatized on a daily basis.
I am not flaming you either here and this is not a personal attack . Am I little excited about this post? Yeah, a little. But, please seriously step back a moment and try to understand what I am going to say because I am not that different than most people on the Internet. I may be an 11, but most people are >=7 on this.
Please try to understand what I am saying. I HATE ADVERTISEMENTS. PURE BLACK SEETHING HATRED. They just get in the way of me being able to enjoy content and to enrich my life with said content. Think about that. I don't watch movie previews on the DVD or even in the theater. I walk in 8 minutes late. I don't even DVR anymore since the bastards sued the automatic commercial skip out of existence. I torrent all the television shows on TV (in 720p even) and watch them without ad content and I might even stop that since complete twats like the Sci-Fi channel are putting whole "footers" in during the middle of Stargate Atlantis that completely distract from the whole damn show. They are going to go broke anyways since Stargate Atlantis is over and the super genius media executives canceled such shows like FireFly and FarScape. I mean seriously, what's left that is worth sitting through ad banners during the shows and commercials between? But I digress....
I will never ever submit to advertisers. It is fundamentally dishonest as a practice. It insults our collective intelligence and provides absolutely no useful information about a service or a product. It is the equivalent of a woman flashing her titties at a bunch of guys to manipulate their wallets out of their pockets like a master illusionist, except 1/1,000,000 as enjoyable. If one learns about advertising and marketing they quickly find it is all about how to manipulate the consumer. How does that sound like an evolved practice worthy of humanity and its potential?
When I want or need something, I will seek the product out. Review sites, consumer reports, anecdotal information, manufacturer websites, etc. At least then the majority of the information will have 1,000,000 times more truth and reality in it than any single advertisement ever could. Period. Truth and advertisements mix about as well as sodium and water.
Web Based Advertisements are the equivalent of the Internet with a case of raging herpes. You lament that only way in your opinion to keep the Internet alive is to submit and accept that herpes is the way of life. Well not for me my friend. Sorry. I would rather not have the websites and their content. That is the cure and I have partaken of the sweet elixir.
Exactly that. Sell T-Shirts and other parapherna
Re:there's a fallacy in there (Score:3, Insightful)
Err, right. No scarcity. So where do I pick up that Aston Martin that's scarce only by virtue of our monetary system?
Re:usefulness and trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertorial isn't a problem.
People don't want to read advertorial, sites employing advertorial become useless and folks will stop reading them.
And yes, blocking will win the race because all they have to do is download the ads and not display them, then the server really is none the wiser. Unless you get into all sorts of crazy technology like embedding client-side javascript that validates the page layout before loading up the content, or some such thing.
Still, in the end it's the person controlling the browser (end-user) that has the power here. This is a fundamental difference from television, and one I really like.
(alright, I know, I can turn the tv off...)
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
A very pessimistic conclusion. If you get enough pageviews (and you really have 200k users) there ought to be plenty of companies you can strike a deal with directly ($250 is peanuts for a large site). If you host the ads locally, there is a very small chance those ads will be automatically blocked with adblock plus.
Remember: with adsense you are only getting a small slice of the pie. If you have a large userbase try to scale up using companies that you know your userbase will be interested in. This way you know what kinds of ads you get on your site and both sides get a better deal. Cut out the middleman (even if it is the big G).
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, this is a good recommendation. In fact, I already did that on the largest of my pages (the one with the 200k users). The problem I found with alternative ad providers was their requirements. The ad provider I'm using now is only for websites with 10.000 unique users a day! It took my site quite a while to reach that amount of users.
The good thing with Google AdSense is that everyone can implement ads on their site, no matter how small.
But I don't want to turn that into a discussion about Ad providers. My point was that not all ads are disruptive and evil if they are well placed. And they help keep websites alive.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
wrong assumptions (Score:3, Insightful)
So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention.
That's marketing drivel. What it really means is: "The stuff that the user came for is being pushed aside by more and more and more aggressive advertisement."
Geez, wonder if that just might be one of the reasons that more and more people block ads?
The whole advertisement industry needs to get one important fact into their heads, and that is that nobody wants their crap. Once they've realized that, and start working on a way to push it out in ways that people don't mind enough to block and filter, the value of ads might increase again.
However, for the past 20 years or so, the solution to every advertisement problem has been "more ads". These days, when you walk down McDonalds street, past the AOL stadium, on your way to the Powered by IBM subway, you pass more ads than you'd have seen in an hour or two when you were young. But I said "pass", not "notice".
I remember times when the local stadium was named for its team, not some random company, when there were things that were not being "presented by" some logo, and when you could watch TV for 30 minutes straight without one advertisement.
Fact of the matter is: Advertisement has changed. It's a lot about brand recognition today. The problem being that there are hundreds, if not thousands of brands that compete for your recognition, and they compete by trying to scream louder than the others.
On the web, we can filter them, and the louder they scream, the easier it is. That's why what is really a global advertisement business crisis shows up as a problem in web-based ads first.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
There weren't any because the ad's didn't cause an itch that needed to be scratched. As soon as ads started to cause that itch to programmers they wrote the program to scratch it.
Re:International Nature of the Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
The exact same way I expect to get use of interest-free money and cashback bonuses from credit card companies: I expect other people to subsidize it for me. Those people are either too dumb to figure it out, too lazy, too busy, or too disinterested. It's all the same to me.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
maybe you'll answer equally forthrightly and reasonably.
I actually read your entire post and it's going to be pretty difficult to argue my point with you. First and foremost, I don't have a job in IT, as most of the /. readers do. In fact (*cringe*) I work for a marketing/advertising agency. We don't do web banner ads, though. Most of our clients are local businesses with a mid-range to high-range budget. My father also used to run a marketing agency, so, as you can see, I'm biased.
How many ads do /you/ know that have concise well reasoned explanations of why I should spend my hard earned money on their product?
A lot. As stated above, I'm not into web banner ads and personally have to agree that there aren't a lot of good banner type ads. But the regular
Instead, most are flashy "programming" ads aimed at the "programmable zombie"
To clarify: I only run AdSense text ads on my websites (the ones that are Adsense sponsored). So no images/flash for you.
Even more damning, experience suggests that any brand spending money on ads is in general going to be a relatively low value-for-money proposition, since they both are spending all that money on ads rather than directly increasing value for money, and tend to demand higher margins, than the generic alternatives that do NOT spend money on ads.
If by brand you also mean businesses, you are severely misled. If, say, a local hotel would not invest in advertising, they would be bankrupt within half a year. This is no overdramatization, it's a simple fact.
Also, generic alternative brands can only get away without advertising because the advertising for the basic product they sell is already done by another company. There are two types of advertising. Either you want to market/promote a product (say Aspirin), or you want to promote and increase the awareness of your company brand/name (in this case Bayer). Most Aspirin ads you see increase product awareness, not brand awareness. So what Bayer does at the same time, is making it easier for producers of Aspirin genericas.
I don't buy new cars and pay good money as a down payment for the "privilege" of having my car drop in value immediately as I drive it off the lot, to the point I only catch up to it a year or two later
I only buy new cars (in fact, I just did buy one two weeks ago). I can see why someone would only buy used cars but I want the comfort (no service for 2-3 years) and reliability (can't argue that) of a new car. I'm aware of the fact that I pay a prime price for this.
But I'm not normal (whew! relief!). I at least /hope/ the zombie programming method doesn't work so well on me -- and /know/ I take insult at it, and feel /far/ better when people appeal to reason to sell me on something.
I earn my money based on the fact that people like you (and I include myself, to a degree) are very, very, very rare.
Right. I'm simply lowering the click-thru and conversion-to-sale rate of the entire thing. Better I not even download the ad in the first place, so I don't unfavorably distort the statistics. People like me are a cost of business in terms of bandwidth, just as the people that come into a store and use the rest room or get water without buying anything are a cost of business.
This is true, and I'm glad if people like you block the ads on my sites. I'm also making it easy for the adblockers by calling the divs that contain the ads "ad" and making the whole layout collapsible, so nothing looks weird when the ads are gone.
But if Firefox and Internet Explorer both came with an adblocker preloaded, I couldn't pay for the hosting any more. Well, Google would also have a problem in this case I guess.
Me
Re:International Nature of the Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
I would go so far to find ways to forbid the access to my sites to people with adblock&co. It's my content and you will see it my way or not at all.
You should not be so quick to initiate a technology arms race with the IT geeks over ad blocking. It is one that server operators, site owners, and advertisers will almost certainly lose and more to the point it is unnecessary. The most effective use of ad blocking requires technical knowledge of protocols, regular expressions, and the like. It is better to simply let the less than 20% of web users who are savvy enough to configure and use these technologies go, we wouldn't have clicked on or bought anything anyway. In fact, you should be thanking us for using ad blockers because by NOT downloading any ads we are inflating your click through ratios (i.e. the number of people who are served an ad and actually clicked through) by selecting ourselves out of the group that was served an ad but did NOT click on it. From what I understand NO advertisers pay for simple impressions anymore (or if they do then it is is very very little), they want click through and they will only pay for clicks on sale conversions. If your sites are small or don't serve as a storefronts for products then you are probably better off with dontations, swag (t-shrits and the like), and subscriptions than with ads.