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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Monetizing content with DISPLAY ads is no joke.

The sheer number of tools display networks have at their fingertips to try to unlock value from your visitor's eyeballs are astounding - RTB exchanges / re-targeting / user profiling / etc / etc.

And even with all of that most content producers can't make a living off of their cut.

I always loved the simplicity of The Deck, but their end was inevitable.

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Yup. Reading their post, it appears they didn't want to play the contemporary adtech game because it felt scummy, so they became unprofitable and quit.

Publishers massively overvalue their inventory and don't understand how their million views are worth only buttons. Ad networks can't pay more because they don't get paid more from the advertisers. The key is that no one clicks on banners any more, so it really is a race to the bottom.

Did people ever click on banners after like 2002? CTR on these things are abysmal.

The whole ad business reeks of desperation. However, it does pay the bills, so I guess it actually works.

It works with intent but "intent" is really only available to Bing, Google, etc. where the user is searching for something _specific_ to purchase.

For instance someone googling reviews of Samsung Dryers probably is considering buying a dryer of some kind.

The further you get from that initial intent the less valuable your ads are until they are basically worthless.

CTR isn't the only KPI by which ads are sold. These days, publishers understand that ads still influence even if normal users don't actually click. When a purchase is preceded by an impression from my ad network, in some cases I can get credit for a portion of it.

Agree that CTR isn't the main metric that matters from a business perspective, but it's the one to verify the statement "no one clicks on banners".

Isn't that the wrong question?

what I'd really like to know is whether banners are a worthwhile investment, not if they get clicked on.

Carbon Ads has pretty solid CTR, ads perform, advertisers renew, etc. It's not all doom and gloom for online advertising when you respect users and work hard to combine quality advertisers and publishers.

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