I've been seeing signs of the apocalypse for a while and I know many (most?) of you are - I know people here are tracking the rise of ad blocking and so on. I feel like the bottom is about to fall out on ad-supported web publishing... and here's another sign...
QuoteWe estimate that the online advertising market has been artificially inflated since the end of 2013, and is much more mature than its pundits are claiming. 90% of Google's revenues come from advertising. We expect Alphabet's share price to go down by 75%. We get this number by revising its earnings down by 30%, stripping its 30x PE off its "growth premium" down to 15x, and factoring in the reputational damage. Other, nimbler "ad tech" players will be wiped out (Rocket Fuel, Millennial Media, Tremor Video, The Rubicon Project).
https://kalkis-research.com/google-end-of-the-online-advertising-bubble
This is a long, but good read.
Long ago in a Th3core ver 2.0 (or was it ver 3?), there was a thread that outlined the then-ridiculous prospect of a future housing price collapse. That thread turned out to be dead-on. One sentence in that thread comes to mind...
We don't have a mechanism in place to handle this.
They're tapping into that in the article. They refer a lot to "subprime advertising space."
What I am uncertain about is what this means for people like us? Perhaps it isn't necessarily a bad thing for web-entrepreneurs. The rise of adblock hurts big companies, FB, Yahoo, Bing and especially Google. It also means that non-paid traffic becomes more valuable. JS powered remote ads will continue to get less impressions, but probably the cost for those impressions/clicks will continue to rise as there is less advertising space available. Meanwhile the old affiliate techniques of obfuscating advertising and masking redirect links will become more valuable, and perhaps more acceptable by the mainstream publishers and traffic juggernauts. In effect, the rest of the web will have to do stuff we were doing years ago. Change will create opportunity for the nimble.
> rest of the web will have to do stuff we were doing years ago.
*Except* without ads the backbone of what currently funds the search engines and alpha sites will dry up.
>what this means for people like us?
We're ditching DFP and all ad-serving software, and building a custom, in-house system. The ads should be difficult to block.
Type-in domains might be big winners.
Quote from: rcjordan on June 08, 2016, 06:33:00 PM
*Except* without ads the backbone of what currently funds the search engines and alpha sites will dry up.
That's kind of the part I'm thinking of. I think there will be a huge fallout in web publishing. Lots of sites will dry up and I think what will differentiate the quick from the dead will be content that people are willing to open their wallets for either directly by paying for a subscription or indirectly by buying the actual product the publisher is selling (like Moz - the tons of content are really just a commercial for Moz).
We're already seeing paywalls tightening up at NYT and Economist (fewer free articles per month). Mother Jones just went to a "pledge" model similar to the way public radio works in the US (which I think may be a model for many).
But then you have the Buzzfeeds of the world. Tons of traffic, but will anyone ever open her wallet for a monthly Buzzfeed subscription?
So back to Littleman's question, this I think is what the article means by subprime advertising space. For banner ads and retargeting on the Google display network, there will be fewer and fewer slots and higher and higher cost. Will the quality match the cost? I don't know and, in any case, that question may be rendered moot by ad blockers.
In brief, I think if you compare the landscape today to five years from now, online advertising will look more like advertising in any other media (I mean relative to today, not that it will look more like print advertising than web advertising, but the web model of the future will edge closer to the print model of today than it is currently). That will be especially true if everyone installs tracking blockers and it becomes much harder to get granular info on ROAS.
I also wonder which Google divisions will continue to run at a profit once ad blockers are ubiquitous.
Will Gmail disappear as a free service? Google Voice? Drive? Apps?
>We expect Alphabet's share price to go down by 75%
Holy moly! Wow, auch, wow.
>We're ditching DFP
Auch, wow. It's ALL the rage here with our SEM and Ad buying teams. They rely HEAVILY on in from a advertiser perspective.
I can't say as much information in this topic out here as I might inside, but those who know what we do will understand how closely I've been looking at this issue (as I've literally bet the house on online ads).
The sharp end of this is Web display (aka banners). Those are the ads that are being down-priced, blocked, abused, over-supplied and defrauded (plus the looming question of whether the end of the web is nigh) . Other online advertising is proving more resilient (in stream, in app etc).
The display ad business isn't taking it lying down though. They're finally over the fear of talking about ad blocking and are responding. I think that we'll see the big players pushing for quality and creating distance between them and the low end of the market. "safe" formats will become part of that too.
Might all be too late though. People don't block bad ads. They see bad ads then block all ads. That's going to be hard to change.
>People don't block bad ads
They also see a good one, just a little too late, hit the back button and its gone. Might be an angle?
>as I might inside
Take it inside, please, RT
I've just read that Kalkis Research post in full. I don't disagree with some of their conclusions, but I don't think that they really know the space very well either.
>>We're already seeing paywalls tightening up at NYT and Economist
There are a few big sports blogs for a couple cities that are moving to a paid subscription model and are doing very well for themselves. They put out some of the best sports content for their respective cities and the fans are willing to pay. The readers appreciate the solid writing and would rather pay a few bucks a month than have to sift through all the ads to find the content. Luckily they will still be running traffic to us through their affiliate links.
"Here are 3 simple rules if you don't want me to block your ads:
1- Serve them from the same server you're serving your content from, in the same session. No 3rd parties, period. Yeah, I know it's inconvenient, but life is inconvenient. Deal with it.
2- Make sure ads weigh 10% or less of the total page size. If the page is 500 KB, the ads should be 50 KB or less. This is perfectly doable.
3- Make sure they're completely static. No video, no sounds, no javascript. HTML links are obviously fine.
I think these are very reasonable criteria, don't you agree?"
https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4n3sny/according_to_ceo_thompson_of_the_new_york_times/d41aeiv?context=3
Quote from: nffc on June 09, 2016, 08:49:21 AM
"Here are 3 simple rules if you don't want me to block your ads:
1- Serve them from the same server you're serving your content from, in the same session. No 3rd parties, period. Yeah, I know it's inconvenient, but life is inconvenient. Deal with it.
2- Make sure ads weigh 10% or less of the total page size. If the page is 500 KB, the ads should be 50 KB or less. This is perfectly doable.
3- Make sure they're completely static. No video, no sounds, no javascript. HTML links are obviously fine.
I think these are very reasonable criteria, don't you agree?"
https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4n3sny/according_to_ceo_thompson_of_the_new_york_times/d41aeiv?context=3
I saw that post too, and no I don't think that they are reasonable - and I also don't think that the OP meant it.
Criteria like this are only realistic to the largest of publishers (ok, I know that the post was about NYT, but the comment was more general). In typical reddit fashion the assumption is that all ads are served by mega-corps and are managed in some weird, last century bubble. Direct serving of ads only works if you have a small number of advertisers buying a large amount of advertising - ie you are a huge publisher doing direct deals at a premium. That's great if you are: Your sales team spend months on the deal, your dev team produce the creatives, your adops team traffic them and your account managers keep everyone happy enough to pay $30 CPM.
However, that isn't typical of ad serving. The internet isn't the newspaper stand dominated by a few big publishers. There are millions of small publishers trying to do their best with small buys at low CPMs. The typical buy is a few hundred impression at under $1 CPM. The time it takes to raise an invoice costs enough to make the deal unprofitable. That's why networks and exchanges exist and we don't currently have another model to support and independent web. Either we fix RTB of we're all logging on to the Murdock / Fox internet.
The online ad eco system is out of hand. Want to know how out of hand? check out the ad-tech lumascape (http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-lumascape/). Clearly that isn't right.
My response then:
1- Serve them from the same server you're serving your content from, in the same session. No 3rd parties, period. Yeah, I know it's inconvenient, but life is inconvenient. Deal with it.Not inconvenient. Simply not at all viable for most of the internet.
2- Make sure ads weigh 10% or less of the total page size. If the page is 500 KB, the ads should be 50 KB or less. This is perfectly doable.Ad requests begin before the page is loaded in order to reduce load times. To base the maximum creative size on the page size would mean until the size of every asset is known before making the ad request. That would be incredibly painful and the opposite of a good user experience.
3- Make sure they're completely static. No video, no sounds, no javascript. HTML links are obviously fine.Most ads are HTML or Image, but javascript is used to serve them. Ad blockers block them anyway.
Why I think the reddit OP didn't mean itAd blockers are like a scorched earth policy. Everything gets blocked, good or bad. If people blocked ads on annoying sites that would be great - more money for the sites doing it well and everyone gets encouraged to do a better job. That isn't what happens though. They try to block everything, which means that the only sites that do well are those that serve the worst ads to the rest of their users or get sneaky with their ad delivery.
Ad blockers are making advertising worse. They are hurting those that play nicely the most and encouraging more aggressive advertising. 2 years ago very few publishers that I worked with wanted to use interstitials, video ads, take-overs etc. Now I am asked about them every week by a publishers who needs ways to offset the revenue lost to ad blocking.
I think that there was a huge opportunity lost with ad blocking. If ABP in particular had started out from the position of trying to block bad ads not all ads we would have a tool that was pushing publishers to do better rather than worse. Worse still, I think that a more "reasonable" blocker that allowed people to block particular types of ads (flash, HTML5, large formats, video, more than X per page etc) wouldn't work today. The likely end game is less independent content and a further move away from web to apps (which means less publishers still).
Big newspapers and facebook win.
Interesting survey : https://surveys.survata.com/public/c25e0ffd-9f8f-4b59-b5e2-88db999b9eda/ad-blocking?utm_source=quora
60% of respondants value 'not having to view ads' over 'free online content supported by ads'
35% of respondents iether don't know, or don't care what happens if 100% of people blocks ads
Am I just turning into a grumpy old man, but a lot of this seems to related to the "everything for nothing" culture so prevalent in millennials? Celebrity culture, ad-blocking, the way the UBI idea is becoming a bandwagon. There might be reasons/catalysts for each but the common these is "I want stuff, but I don't want to work or pay for it".
> I just turning into a grumpy old man...millennials
Maybe.
I am pretty sure the only different between Millennials and us old timers when it comes to adblocking is the percentage of folks who know how to implement it. I am willing to bet that the majority of the Core is using adblock.
Quote from: littleman on June 10, 2016, 05:14:25 PM
I am willing to bet that the majority of the Core is using adblock.
I don't!
OK - I have most of the popular ad blockers installed (testing) but have them all disabled for general use.
I resisted for a long time, but I finally installed ad blockers a couple of months ago when I realized how much bandwidth they sucked up and when I saw how mercilessly I am tracked from site to site. I think I mentioned this before... I recently was the "talent" in an ad and that really opened my eyes to how much I was being tracked - everywhere I went on the web, there I was on the page. Very disconcerting and it was the straw that made me realize it had gone to far.
I do believe people need to pay for content and would prefer to see some micropayment networks evolve where I can participate and, if I opt in, I don't see ads, but I pay a small amount per page view.
The two options available now are just no longer acceptable to me
- bombarded with ads that track me at every click and suck up my bandwidth and actually cost me money because I do, in fact, pay for bandwidth. I'd rather give the publisher that money than the advertiser.
- subscribe for $30-$100/year to dozens of publications. Really? I need a $60 subscription to your publication because I want to read two articles this year? Also not viable.
I support publishers' right to block my access if I block their ads.
Do you use any of the email existing micropayment services like Google contributor?
>but a lot of this seems to related to the "everything for nothing" culture so prevalent in millennials?
It's related to the obtrusive, bandwidth hogging, distracting etc etc etc nature of the ads.
The problem isn't the user, it's the ads.