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Comment by stevesearer | Hacker News Reader

My ad-run business is doing pretty well and I'm the only person running it. Ad blocking doesn't seem to have affected me - yet - because my ads are relevant, nice to look at, and self-hosted. Readers and advertisers (and me) get value out of them.

I hope I'm around in the future, and I hope that other websites will see the light and follow good practices.

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This is a really great perspective. My background is in the print publishing world...going back to the late 90s. What I realize is that we keep going back to that world for guidance on what the future of the web will hold (in terms of content publishing). The first place I saw this was in design. In the wild west of the early net (prior to about 10 years ago), there was really not much rhyme or reason to how websites were designed. Then people like Khoi Vinh started advocating for grid structure in web design...bringing a concept that was well developed in the print world.

Today, we seem to be fighting for this false binary of either a web with ads or one without. What the old world of print might teach us is the importance of quality, limited, relevant advertising. When done well, people are not only OK with advertising, they embrace and look forward to it. Magazines were best at this...but they've gone down the path of devaluing their ads by moving towards more and more paid content (advertorials) and by overwhelming the content with the quantity of ads.

I think in the end, publishers will have no choice but to see what you see or else perish.

"When done well, people are not only OK with advertising, they embrace and look forward to it."

Only in the mind of some advertising execs, what on earth makes you think people bought magazines for the adverts?

I have the copy of Newsweek that run only Macintosh ads back in 1984. I bought it on eBay just for the ads, certainly not for the feature about Ronald Reagan!

All of women's fashion magazine industry.

Computer Shopper.

Lucky.

Can you tell us a bit more please? Did you essentially roll your own internal AdWords? How do you manage customers, campaigns, tracking, payments, etc.?

Sure, it really isn't anything special. I essentially treat the site like a magazine and sell advertisements on a monthly basis because that is the easiest thing for both myself and advertisers understand.

The site runs on WordPress so I just use one of the ad rotation plugins available [adrotate pro]. Most campaigns are for some set number of weeks or months and the plugin takes care of that.

I track clicks and advertisers track referrals traffic plus whatever other metrics they want to on their own websites. Because a number of advertisers renew regularly, I trust that they are happy with the results they are seeing. For payments, it kind of depends on the customer, but basically I just invoice them.

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