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Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

The only ads I can ever remember clicking on were accidental.

The only ads that really make sense, I think, are the branding/image/guiding type ads, not the performance-based CTR ads that have taken over the tubes.

Toyota did a whole damage control series during the purported uncontrolled acceleration debacle, and I noticed them and it influences your opinion. As do ads that build an image or general awareness: If I know about a brand of SSDs, maybe I'll search for that brand the next time I'm looking.

Ads that succeed or fail based upon a click have always been dumb. Remarkable that Google built a whole empire on it.

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When I use google to search for something that I want to buy, I quite often comparison shop the ad links that google puts up.

Other ad links? Like you, pretty much never.

One of the reasons I'm skeptical about advertising going forward (among several) is that as metrics get good enough, advertisers are going to want to stop paying for people like me who are minimally affected by ads.

Anecdote time..

Podcasts are still attracting plenty of advertisers, even with non-trackable generic ads, leading me to believe some advertisers don't care for tracking.

Check out Dan Benjamin's 5by5 family of podcasts - they're pretty much funded by advertising and most of it is poorly trackable. I don't know what he charges but from other similar podcasts I do know the figures for I have reason to believe it's higher than $50 per 1000 listeners per show - this is astronomical compared to trackable forms of advertising online.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and the ads they do register in my brain. I usually listen while doing the dishes or some such and I don't fast forward past them. Unlike visual ads, I can't look past them either. So I am consciously aware of almost all of them.

Some of his advertisers (and I have heard this in other podcasts, too) seem to be handing out discount codes (usually the name of the podcast or something like that) which would allow them to track their success fairly well.

Television. Or Radio. Or Billboards. All better examples than podcasts.

I think cost of influence is a more important metric for judging how serious advertisers are than the overall size of a market.

Take television, for example:

"during the 2007-08 season, Grey's Anatomy was able to charge $419,000 per advertisement"

Independently, I found the viewing figures were 17-18 million per episode for that season. So about $24.65 "CPM". And that was one of the best mainstream, regular ad returns on TV (CSI had a higher audience and far lower charges per ad). That's half of what I know even minor podcasts are making..

On the flip side, a TV show tends to have many ads packed in whereas a podcasts runs with a few at most but in terms of CPM, they seem to trump most TV.

fascinating. I wasn't aware of the ad rates for podcasts. Are they for american audiences or overall audiences? Because I would see Australian ads if I watches Grey's Anatomy or CSI -- but I hear the generic ads when I listen to TWIT.

My point was more that TV/etc is a fundamentally less trackable audience. (agreeing with your point that some advertisers don't require tackable ads).

Google's (core) ad business has less in common with traditional media advertising, and more in common with paying the store to put your product in a special display. They realized that people were using their search engine as a big storefront, and adapted the same basic model.

Display adds have definitely made an impression on me. But, for whatever reason, I tend not to click on the adds, but to open a new tab and google the product. I'd click on them if doing so did that process for me. I.e. "Click here to google <random product/service>."

I remember those ads. Every time one came on, my first thought was, "Oh yeah, this is that company that sent out those cars that tried to kill their drivers."

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