How can we make ads not suck?
Google does well because the ads shown on search bring forth some form of utility. List as comments how ads could "not suck". Maybe a long list of grievances will prompt things to somehow get better. It's better than complaining and arguing with each other.
2) Make ads relevant. I'm a happily married stay-at-home dad. I'm not interested in dating ads, but ads for better bottles could get my attention. Keyword-driven or site-demographic-driven ads are a start. As dpcan suggested, browsers could allow us to tag ourselves and our interests, which would be even better.
3) Get rid of common annoyances: flashing ads, ads that eat CPU and grind my browser to a crawl, ads on sites I might visit from work or with my kids that aren't safe for work/kids, popups/popunders, ads that block my view of the content I'm looking for, and misleading ads. (Again, if you're a host, vet your ads!)
4) Do not compromise user privacy. Don't track my browsing; base ads off of the site I'm on or information I voluntarily tagged myself with.
Many of the webcomics I read use Project Wonderful, and they seem to have a pretty good model. I regularly see interesting ads, and almost never see offensive ads, scams, or CPU killers.
If an ad platform could approach a point of such relevancy that users wouldn't see the ads as advertisements but friendly suggestions, that company would change the way the web works!
Frequently on HN we get a lot of people who are great at building stuff but fall when it comes to finding and growing a userbase.
We then have people that are great at developing a community, have a popular niche blog or forum, and are itching to monetize their community.
Serving ads to solve this problem is like strip-mining for gold - ridiculous sediment to gold ratio.
So what if we concentrated on the affiliate model. Rather than serving ads to your community, you vet actual products and services that your community would actually use and genuinely endorse the product openly. You could run a drop-in type of "marketplace page" for your endorsements. It would be clear to your community that you receive (large) commissions on these sales, but I reason happy users would want to help your site. I'm talking 50%+ commissions so you can easily profit share in terms of offering a better price than they'd pay going directly anyway.
For product and service providers, I can't see a downside. They pay only from actual sales. The product is seen in a positive light (endorsed) rather than overlooked as an ad. And product providers could/should work closely to community moderators to iterate on their product.
As of now this seems like wishful thinking I know, but this could definitely be worked out, and provided it was dead-easy to get started from both ends, it's worth testing.
Make dropping in an affiliate marketplace easy for content providers. And make revenue sharing, management, and tracking easy for product providers. Develop community around connecting the two in a vetted environment. Profit off transaction fees.
The main reason advertising is annoying is because we are looking for something else, we don't need it right now, or its the wrong audience.
If you had a huge spare tire and wanted rock hard abs, and the advertisement could prove the safety of your purchase, you would say "HELL YEAH!"
When I was 16 the advertisement for Proactiv was very engaging. It worked and I was amazed. I'm no longer a zitty teenager so now I find their advertisements annoying.
I recently joined the Spiceworks team, and it is free software. It is advertisement driven, but most in the case where you need it. It is IT management software. As an example, if you see your SQL server getting slammed, you could see an ad that offers you RAM for that specific machine. Does this advertisement suck? Probably not.
One reason advertising could suck is due to audience. If you go to Digg (which has a wide audience) you are going to get wide or undirected ads. This is why targeted advertisement is all the rage these days - because its less annoying, and more to the point effective and win-win in more cases than not.
I'd say to make advertising not suck, don't involve yourself in communities without a common interest or goal. If you are an IT manager and you are in an IT community, you will more than likely get IT advertisements. If you are watching MTV... well...
So this is two fold, you remove the ads that don't work (so you don't annoy your audience), which in turn creates a more potent advertising experience for vendors which makes that real estate more attractive.
The trick is not letting every dog through the door and keeping some class.
I put sites I like (and that have tasteful ads) in the AdBlock whitelist. I really wish there was a way to only block the annoying ads. Sounds like an idea for an AdBlock subscription list actually.
When I install FF, I should be asked what applies to me (tech, baseball, family) and then all advertising can look to this public info first and display what's relevant only.
THIS should replace ad-blockers. Then we don't have to destroy our favorite sites' revenues and I don't have to see any prescription medicine ads.
And get rid of ads I have to "skip", ads that "pop-under", and ads that cover what I'm supposed to be reading.
As far as my personal experience goes, I can't remember a time I encountered a Google ad that was useful for me, unless I was searching for "Amazon.com" and Amazon.com shows up in the sponsored links.
But to answer your question, ads can not suck by simply being perfectly targeted. Even though perfect is impossible, that should be the goal of all advertisers nonetheless. Get as much info about people, and send them only ads you know will be useful. Advertiser wins because they got the word out about their great thing, consumer wins because they got a great thing. The only thing this ideal wouldn't help is a shitty product. Shitty products aren't great, so if they get undeserved attention, they just screw over more people.
If anyone wants to read the whitepaper, feel free to send me an email. The truly adventurous can check out the patent application (#11948995).
- Don't put ads where content should be, I hate when I'm scrolling and there is an ad where I should be reading (unless it is displayed at the end of an article)
- Put ads in a designated area, and stick to that single area
- Only display relevant ads if your site is about web design I don't want to see ads about belly fat or ebay
- No flash or animated ads, this is so annoying and probably makes me leave sites the most because it is just distracting from both your content and my train of thought
- Don't display too many ads, this is also a major problem and just makes me assume that there is no real content and you just want to make money (news sites seem to do this a lot)
2. Don't autoplay audio/video on the ads. Heck, autoplay is bad for content, its super annoying for ads.
3. Increase relevance
4. There are sites where I need to search the content inbetween ads. Would we tolerate if just 30% of our TV screen was video, and the rest were ads? (text, scrolling text etc). Maintain decent ratio between content and ads.
5. Most websites don't even bother to experiment with other ways to make money, like subscription etc. quizlet turns off ads for a donation of 10$ (donations get some more features). Seems like a good experiment. May be others can try that? this could also be an option.
With all that, what the hell is the point of ads? They're just wasting the time of the people producing and consuming them. They do nobody any good at all.
If there was some kind of nonprofit "respectful advertising alliance" that enforced consumer-friendly practices and provided a whitelist to import into adblock plus, I might use it. It would be hard to define what is consumer friendly and enforce the rules, though.
The only site I've disable adblock on is Reddit. This is because their ads use inside jokes and are sometimes humorous and always non-intrusive.
I don't see what is so nice about Google ads. They look crappy on most sites and are rarely useful in my experience. Also not a fan of Google's tracking with adwords.
I would expect that having an easy, obvious rating meter on each ad would work in two ways. First it could improve targeting by having the user reject ads on a case-by-case basis. Second, ads that get rejected by a wide range of user types can be determined to be bad in general (ugly, offensive, annoying) and thus removed from circulation, automatically.
Does anyone know why this isn't in place more? (Or perhaps I just haven't noticed it?)
A few examples that come to mind
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/coffee (bottom of the page)
I'd start with the question "How can I generate revenue without using ads?" Others may have better questions.
Industries tends to find a way to win (or at least fight hard). Our content is going to get a lot worse rather than the advertising better, IMHO.
Rebills and upsells are a way to make a lot of money from a single signup so that's why those advertisers pay top dollar.
And as long as the credit card companies allow scammers to operate this will continue.
An example ad: http://hivelogic.com/
They're clearly not even attempting to scale, but they have the ideas that -- if brought to scale -- could make advertising less sinful.
Then again, if you really have high enough volume, why can't you just try EVERYTHING and then only show ads that get high CTR? Isn't 5k impressions a sufficient sample size?
What about using graphs of campaign clickthru rates for individual people (a la directededge)?
When you write, include in your writing very brief endorsements for products related to your subject. Don't just randomly interject with "oh by the way, go buy Product X!", but if Product X is a brand of hard drive and you're writing about hard drives, take a sentence or two to talk about the advantages of that particular brand. In plain text, just like the rest of your article.
There are TWO important parts to this equation. Many people only seem to realize the first. 1) Make your ads not so obvious that machines can tell they're ads. 2) Make your ads not so annoying that people will update their ad blocking rules to remove them.
In other words, working around the ad blocker to present annoying ads is just going to annoy even further. Your ads have to be seen AND they have to not be immediately blocked again and/or just ignored, and that means they have to be manually inserted so that they are intertwined with the content from both a technical and a writing standpoint.
You might even get away with static banners, that don't stand out too much, at the top and bottom of a page (where we can scroll it off the screen), and text links next to the content area. Just not IN the articles, unless it's part OF the article.
Why did I install an ad blocker in the first place? Because ages ago on gameshark.com, an ad popped up, demanding I join the US Army. I've never left Canada and I was maybe 13 at the time. This ad, for 30 seconds, played an animation with loud sound effects, hogging up all my CPU time and bandwidth (now I knew why the page had loaded so slow), and centred itself under the mouse cursor at all times so I couldn't click anything. It was a Flash layer of some sort, rather than a window, so no keyboard shortcut would be able to do anything either. When this ad finally disappeared, I IMMEDIATELY looked up and installed an ad blocker, and never again went to gameshark.com. If I'd had any interest whatsoever in joining the US Army, that also would have killed it permanently. This is the perfect example of how to do EVERYTHING WRONG with online advertising.
PS: one of the worst comment systems I've ever seen. Requiring registration? Fail. Not stating this until AFTER the comment is submitted? Massive fail. Not stating the requirements on the form until they're violated? Cherry on top.