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Comment by jack9 | Hacker News Reader

> And we don’t want to use an automated system that selects some ads for us.

So they do direct deals mostly, which is antiquated and probably to preserve their branding as a "tech site".

> Did you know we have a lot of unpaid inventory on Stack Overflow every month?

This is what trying to guess your avails with direct ends up doing. Leaving inventory unmonetized. Typically, you get paid less for less of your inventory trying to do monthly manual trafficking.

All they do is display, so it's rather silly to quibble about CPMs in the 25 cent range...until you look at the traffic and realize that translates to real money.

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What you are missing is that there is a cost associated with monetizing the full inventory with automation.

You lose control over what is being shown, you are diluting your brand and you are at risk of alienating your users.

At Stack Overflow we are not willing to make this trade off.

Surely you can automate everything but keep manual curation?

> What you are missing

Automation costs are actually administrative costs (platform fees), which have recently increased via unmonetized opportunity cost models (opportunity being a specific technical term in advertising). SO is not fully or optimally monetizing, probably because they prefer to keep the old tech they are using and/or the staff that has been there since early days. It's also possible they want some dejour/nonstandard controls. Saying they are making an informed tradeoff is simply incorrect. Saying they are making a (unspecified) choice, then not really talking about that choice, is what the article skirts.

Sub 10k/mo for platforms at 2 billion opps per day is AOL and SpotX. That schedule doesn't matter at the volume SO works with. Fees and Opp costs are not the issue with the unmonetized inventory.

Except for all the crap about "targeted advertising", it turns out that if you run a site like StackOverflow, you can more accurately target adverts to your average user by curating the adverts than by letting some system try and guess based on whatever they have managed to sniff.

More importantly, the automated stuff is a huge security risk, and will generally annoy your users when someone puts out something they shouldn't, even if it's not a security issue.

Sure, they could saturate the pages with more crap adverts no one wants, and they would sell for less (because they would be less effective), and they'd piss off their user base.

SO has long been one of the very, very few on my adblocking whitelist. I don't dislike adverts as a core idea, but 99% of advertising online is invasive, annoying and useless.

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