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Comment by Leynos | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't seem that useful to me as only a small number of sites (none of which I visit) support it.

Hypothetical question: If I were allowed to bid on my own ad impressions - and if I won an auction, no ad would be shown - how much would it cost a month for me to see no adverts? (I realize this is heavily dependent upon the type of sites that are involved, so I guess take the average HN user as an example).

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CPM (cost per mille) is highly variable per site, but $1-$10 captures most of them. So one of your views is worth 0.1 to 1 dollar cents.

.001 to .01

The old version of Google contributor did exactly that, it cost around 7$ a month.

But you weren't guaranteed to win the auction, were you?

That's exactly what Contributor used to do. They charged $7/mo and refunded any money they didn't use. Unsure why they changed it.

According to my first search result [1], average CPC is 2.04$ with 1.16% CTR. Say you see 200 pages a day, 2 ads each. You end up at 9.5$/day.

https://www.hochmanconsultants.com/cost-of-ppc-advertising/

Shouldn't you multiply by your specific click through rate? For many people, this is 0.

Indeed. I'm almost 30 and I don't think I've ever clicked on an ad in my life. Cost per impression seems more relevant.

I only click ads when the content jumps at the last second and suddenly it's an ad under my cursor, and other such fun mistakes.

The thing is, for Google we have CPI = CPC • CTR. Which means: if you never click an ad, no money ever changes hands. Thankfully our usage of the web is subsidized by those who do click ;-)

This is certainly relevant to the ad-blocker debates. Counting up "lost revenue" at all-user clickthrough rates is a fairly dirty trick when people running adblockers almost certainly have exceptionally low clickthrough rates.

(It's a lot like the creative accounting around media piracy, actually. Assuming that 100% of people who pay $0 for a torrented movie would have paid $10 instead is absolutely deranged.)

Fair points, but... The whole point of contributor seems to be the warm fuzzy feeling that you still contribute, without seeing ads. At what level is the feeling warm and fuzzy enough? That, in my opinion, would be the correct price for contributor.

Those are paid search numbers. Display is for like avg $2 cpm. (.06% ctr, but it's paid based on impressions not clicks)

So each ad gets a quality score based on clicks. After a few days of no clicks, your own ads would be pulled for a higher quality and more profitable ad would replace it.

Display ads don't get quality scores, that is only for search ads. Display is just auction price.

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