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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

If I owned a site and chose to place advertising on the site, I wouldn't let someone buy that ad space and then not show ads. I want my site visitors to be used to seeing advertisements, not empty space.

My CTR would be terrible on empty space, so in the future what metrics would I report to advertisers to let them know how effective their ads would be? Plus, I wouldn't be confident you could keep your business going indefinitely so I'd likely end up having to sell to advertisers again in the future. So I'll just keep showing ads because I know I can sell ad spaces to someone. There's only one person who wants to buy empty space (you).

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I don't get it - conceptually isn't a site/service provider selling the ad space to the highest bidder already? Isn't the goal to max out that revenue?

Maybe allowing your "best" consumers to opt out of ads makes overall CTR drop to some level below which advertisers will no longer want to use your site.

Any insight into numbers for this? It is way outside my knowledge.

I'm guessing, for example, if I said to you - hey, I like your site and will pay $1,000,000 a year to see it without ads that might be a deal you would take?

> hey, I like your site and will pay $1,000,000 a year to see it without ads that might be a deal you would take?

Depends on who the second place bidder is and what their bid is. Depends on what my site is. Depends on what my longterm goals are.

Remember that I have 0 confidence that the magic buying ad space and leaving it blank company will be around for long.

> conceptually isn't a site/service provider selling the ad space to the highest bidder already? Isn't the goal to max out that revenue?

Kind of and no. There are plenty of ways to maximize revenue today that fuck you tomorrow. My Bible sales website might get a ton of ad money from PornHub today as a gag but it’s not good for business.

CTR is only relevant if it leads to revenue, if you can get revenue anyway why would you bother with the CTR?

Because I have 0 faith that the people buying blank space are going to be around for long.

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