Countless well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people have taken a swing at making friendly advertising that is both respectful of the viewer and valuable to the advertiser. The problem is that it very rarely works out in the long run because well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people really do not like “the business” advertising. And viewer-friendly advertising is often of very little to no value to the advertiser.

The business of advertising is a numbers game. When well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people start out trying to change the world of advertising they typically look at those numbers as they should – they look at them as people. People that don’t want to be swindled or bothered or nagged. People that are at the current web page they are viewing because they really like the blog post they are reading, the newspaper column they are reading, or the video they are watching. People that actually do not like advertising.

So the well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable people say to themselves “I’m one of those people. I don’t like ads. But people that write blogs for free and want to do it full-time need to make money somehow so let’s make a great ad network that sells unobtrusive advertising that people will love.”

Noble. But this business plan isn’t based in reality. This plan can only work if the ad network’s brand is as strong as the brand of the sites in its network. And even then it is questionable whether or not the network can sustain advertiser value longterm. The Deck seems to have success in this area because simply being an advertiser on The Deck comes with some credence. But in my experience this is the exception.

Once the initial novelty of the idea for a viewer-friendly ad network wears off everything comes down to the pageviews and the click-throughs. If the click-throughs are high the pageviews can be lower. If the pageviews are high – and they usually have to be very, very high – the click-throughs can sometimes be not as important since advertisers will typically hope to make up for them with brand recognition of some kind.

And then there is the repeat advertiser problem. If an ad network can bring in brand new advertisers every few months then they needn’t worry about having repeat advertisers. So they needn’t deliver on value. “Your campaign wasn’t all that great but thanks for trying.” And then they simply move onto the next company with $5,000 to spend. The problem is eventually the black books of the individuals running the network will run out of companies to call. Then they have to deliver. Every single month.

Viewer-friendly advertising can work in smaller numbers and with direct relationships with advertisers. However, once an entire “network” of brands are involved it slowly will move away from the relationship between website and brand and move towards the numbers.

Ad dollars will always move towards the latest and greatest thing. The thing the kids love. So newer ad networks with novel ideas on how to do advertising will all typically start off pretty well. Any company with a decent advertising budget will take a crack at whatever the latest fad is. Make no mistake, the same people that will buy your 120×120 pixel well-designed, well-meaning, tasteful, and respectable ad will buy a pop-under ad. They don’t really care about your high-brow morals in the world of advertising. They will go to where the value is. And when your network doesn’t produce value for them in a certain amount of time they’ll stop buying your inventory. Simple.

Patrick Dryburgh nails it in his post about leaving FusionAds:

I hold nothing against the guys running Fusion now. They’re in a tough business, and need to produce page views and sell those page views and then produce and sell some more. So, I get why they need to take money from companies or sign on publishers I don’t think represent the initial vision.

Fusion Ads has to compromise because in the world of advertising there is money in compromising. The more you’re willing to let go of the viewer as the customer and the more you’re willing to give up their experience the more money you’ll make.

Several times in my life where I’ve made the bulk of my income on advertising. Each time I always thought there was a new and better way to do it. A way that didn’t feel so icky. A way to make the viewer and advertiser the customer. It simply isn’t possible. If you’re thinking about starting an ad network of some kind I’d strongly suggest you reconsider.

“With Viddler within three days we were able to roll advertising. That’s ridiculous.”

“Well from my perspective, a film costs a lot of money. You could build three hospitals with the cost of one film and I take that very seriously. I take the responsibility of being a person involved in a piece of that product. The only way to be decent about it is to make that money back so at least you don’t feel that money is wasted.

If it’s cost a hundred million dollars and that money is completely wasted – it never even makes its money back – that would be so mortifying to me. What a waste of money. Better to put it into a hospital. Do you see what I’m saying?

So I feel it’s my responsibility to help the investors – and the investors are often you and me. We don’t realize it, but it’s our pension funds. Through that bank or company that’s investing in this hedge fund, that is investing in the film. So I feel a fiscal responsibility to help the investors.”

I know the resources for larger budget films typically come from multiple sources but I suppose I never realized how the failure of a film could have an effect on some of these funds. Go see a Helen Mirren film.

Inclusion of this ad system into third party applications is not mandatory but is certainly welcomed by developers that were striving to make a buck on free, ad-supported applications. But, Twitter is missing out on the app up sell.

I use Echofon for both iPhone and Mac. I paid $2.99 for the iPhone application (very much worth it). The Mac application is $20 for the paid, no ads, application and free for the ad-supported application. So far the only ads I’ve seen inside of Echofon for Mac has been these new Promoted Tweets from Twitter’s new ad platform.

Here is where I think Twitter loses. When and if I pay Echofon $20 to remove the ads from the application Twitter doesn’t see a lick of it. They also lose ad impressions because Echofon will not display these Promoted Tweets anymore.

I’m not so sure that Twitter needs to care about this because the number of impressions they can count on from their site, search and stream injection is probably much higher than I could guess and growing steadily. But, I still feel they are leaving a bunch of money on the table somehow.

I also changed the way that ads are displayed a little. Instead of having Google Ads on every single page I now only have them on some of the most traffic’d pages on this site. Most of that traffic to those pages comes from search engines. They are also specifically placed between the title and the content. Since I’ve made this switch my daily take for this site has nearly doubled. It isn’t much – but enough for a coffee now and then and to cover the cost of hosting the blog. Perfect.

Carry on.

My “How to: Delete all photos off an iPhone” post gets about 1,000 an average of 1,300 unique visitors a day and that is increasing very steadily. It is, by far, the most popular post on my site now (though my moth photos rival it still).

Here is a graph of how the traffic is growing on that post over time (the graph is a little old now, but the trend is the same):

I’m offering a one-time deal to buy an ad on that specific post for one year for $2,500.00 USD (or the best offer that I get before February 15). At the current growth rate, that will be well over 365,000 unique visitors. That is roughly a $6.85 CPM (this is a low CPM estimate due to an increase in traffic day-over-day) however the graph clearly shows that the traffic is increasing rapidly.

The amount must be paid in full, via Paypal. The ad can be 125×94 and be only in JPG format (no animated GIFs here). A text-based link of “Sponsored by ________” will also be placed on that page.

If you are interested, please contact me at colin [at] cdevroe.com.

Last update: February 2, 2009 at 1:45 EST.

Essentially it is art using paper but instead of Origamido’s approach, which is only using one sheet of paper, Julien uses scissors and other tools to create a scene or object.

Pretty cool stuff.

Source: Julien Vallée.
Via: Coudal Partners.

Brett Wilson

A few weeks ago I had lunch with Brett Wilson, CEO of TubeMogul, and we were talking about the partnership between TubeMogul and Viddler. We also talked about surfing and family, but for now we’ll focus on TubeMogul and Viddler.

A few days later I asked Brett if I could ask him a few questions about something he mentioned over lunch, TubeMogul’s yet-to-be-announced although already launched tier system, and publish them here on my site.  Brett being the great guy that he is didn’t even hesitate.

When TubeMogul turned on support for its users to upload to Viddler as a distribution channel, we began to see all sorts of “spammy” videos and members showing up.  We always had abuse on Viddler, and there was certainly more good than bad coming from the TubeMogul partnership, but we wanted to see if we could help them solve this issue.  Brett explained that they were already working on that.  I’ll let him explain.

Thanks for doing the interview Brett.  Real quickly; can you give us the broad strokes of what TubeMogul aims to do?

Brett: First of all thanks for having me, and hello to all of your readers.  Our goal at TubeMogul is to solve problems for content creators.  First, we make it easy for content creators to deploy video to multiple sites in one shot.  This saves content creators time and often increases the size of their audience.  Next, we bring all of the available analytics back into TubeMogul and give the content creator an aggregated view of their video’s consumption along with easy to use reporting and data export tools.  And TubeMogul is free.

Me: The power of TubeMogul, and the simplicity behind its goals, are palpable. Essentially you can log into TubeMogul, upload a video, choose all of the video sharing sites you want it to appear on, and then track your statistics right there on TubeMogul, without ever having to visit every single video sharing site.  TubeMogul fills a very big need for people like video podcasters who, on their own if TubeMogul didn’t exist, were doing this anyway.

Can you explain what problem the new tier system solves and a little bit about how it works?

Brett: Some video sharing sites we work with are selective about the content they accept.  For example, HowCast is a How-To site and only wants instructional videos.  Other sites, only accept professional quality or episodic videos. While we have nothing against cheap Viagra or making millions from home, many of our partner sites consider these videos to be spam.  To address these issues, we are asking content creators to go through a one-time review process to deploy video to certain sites.  This will be a painless process - fill out a simple form and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours.  Approved content creators will be able to deploy to any or all sites of their choosing.

Me: I can tell you that from Viddler’s perspective, this system is really great and means a lot to us.  This shows that TubeMogul is interested in creating a quality product, not a spammy one.  TubeMogul could have easily allowed spam-like content to any of the channels, and left it up to us to weed out the crap.  This would have “fluffed” their statistics, made them appear bigger than they really are, and would have looked good on paper.  But they didn’t do that – they are focused on building a product that is both valuable to the content producer and the content consumer (all the way down to the viewer). 

In other words; if you start seeing less spam on your favorite video sharing site – send Brett an email and thank him and his team for their hard work.  They are cutting the problem off at the bud.

Brett in India, 2006

Do you have any plans, or have you already, to add actual SPAM  filtering techniques to TubeMogul?  Obviously there are some “repeat  offenders” with video spam, some of which could be detected?  Or do you feel it is a moving target?

Brett: The tier system we are putting into place is a trust-based system.  If a content creator tells us that they have appropriate videos then we will give them the keys to the kingdom. If we see abuse then I suppose we will have to take away the keys.  Do keep in mind that very few of the tens of thousands of videos that we deploy each day are spam.

Me: He’s right. The vast majority of the video that we see at Viddler from TubeMogul is not spam.  But as all of us that have dealt with publishing systems know, spam always becomes a problem.  It started with the postal mail system, spread onto the Internet in the form of email, comment spam, and now we’re seeing video spam.  It is a sad inevitability.  I’m happy TubeMogul is choosing to use a human system to battle it rather than a electronic one.

I think the best part about TubeMogul is that hard working video producers can easily share their video on multiple services quickly and easily, and also have a one-stop area to view statistics from each of those services; how do you see this new tier system being of benefit to high-quality video producers?

Brett: If we can help to eliminate spam in the online video ecosphere we help to keep everyone’s focus and energy on content that people want to consume. And of course less spam means lower infrastructure and bandwidth costs for all.

Me: Have you ever seen a better sentence in your life?  Read it again, I urge you.  What he is saying is that by building this system they are helping to find the signal through the noise. Actually, he is saying they will cut down the noise entirely.  By doing so, people can find what they want easier (which is better for viewer and producer alike), and services like Viddler won’t have to pay to host spam.  This helps everyone.

Side note: If I told you how much Viddler has had to pay to host spam and pirated content, you’d fall out of your chair.  Behind-the-scenes we’ve been building and refining our methods to combat these issues, and we’ve gotten really good at it.  But this new tier system from TubeMogul is going to help us a lot.

You said, in a recent Beet.tv interview I saw, that the big problem now is monetizing these videos.  TubeMogul helps by providing accurate statistics for videos to deliver to potential advertisers.  Does TubeMogul ever envision themselves having potential advertisers ask them where the hotspots are based on your analytics?  Has this already happened?

Brett: Yes, we do intend to utilize the cross-site data we are collecting to help advertisers discover content creators that can help them to reach their desired audience.  By the way, this is absolutely in line with our mission to help solve problems for content creators.  

We also realize that for many content creators the endgame may not be ad revenue…in some cases the name of the game is fame; and in other cases the video itself is the ad or serves a promotional capacity.

Me: He sorta dodged that last question (probably not on purpose and maybe he’ll leave a comment on this post if he sees it).  My guess is that if you want to advertise with video on the Web, TubeMogul is going to become a major source for accurate statistics to place those advertisements efficiently.  I’m excited to see what the future holds both for TubeMogul and Viddler as we work together to help video producers earn a living from their hard work.

Well, always be sure to direct any advertising interest towards Viddler.com ok?

Brett: I’ve got my Viddler shirt on now

Thanks for doing the interview and thanks to you and your team for building a great product in TubeMogul.

Brett: My pleasure and likewise. 

Me: My reasons for doing this interview with Brett are many-fold.  First, I wanted to show why Viddler’s partnership with TubeMogul was an easy decision. How innovative and proactive the TubeMogul is.  When we added support for TubeMogul to Viddler many people were happy about it (as they’d been asking for it for months beforehand).  However, there were some that were disappointed because of the influx of videos that were coming to Viddler, who were not part of the community on Viddler.  Uploading through TubeMogul is definitely not a warm, community-like experience.  It used to be that you were a Viddler member, you interacted with other Viddler members, and Viddler members were the people viewing, commenting, and favoriting your videos.  Now we’re seeing people that upload video to Viddler that never fill out their profiles.  This has caused a small amount of community displeasure, but it is a problem we’re going to work on solving – and with the TubeMogul team at the healm, I know that we’re both up for that challenge.

As a small suggestion to video content producers: Interact with the communities that you share your videos with.  It will go a long way towards building a large, interactive audience.

The other reason is that I’m still a firm believer in niches.  Brett touched on it with his example of How-Cast and how some videos “belong” on one service but might not fit on another.  I believe the future of online video is going to be in niches (it is already happening) and I think TubeMogul, and services like it, are going to be one of the ways this separating work occurs.  The question is how to we, Viddler, fit into that vision of the future and work with companies like TubeMogul to provide the best possible platform to host video regardless of the niche.  I think we know how and we’ll continue to execute on that vision of the future.

Thanks again to Brett and TubeMogul for all of their hard work.

My experiment was to only show ads to people that came from search engines, and those that have not commented on my site in a while, or ever (shame on you).  In fact, if you came from a search engine, the site would show you two sets of ads; one on the top of the post and one on the bottom.  This method of displaying ads very selectively, I think, has improved the overall statistics regarding my ads.  Which I’ll share with you now – in perhaps too great of detail for some of you.

My click through rate is at 0.33% and my average eCPM is $0.94 (though today it is inexplicably at nearly $3.50).  If I’m able to keep the click through rate fairly high, and continue to increase the traffic on my site, I’d stand to do pretty well for a personal blog within about a year.

Above is a graph showing my sites overall page views over a 1-year period, not counting my own hits to this site.  Obviously I wasn’t interested in these numbers until I began this experiment on January 3rd of this year, which I’ve marked with a 1. Since then the trend has noticeably angled in the desirable direction, which I’ve marked with a 2.  The number 3 on this chart is the current month, which is not fully calculated until the month is over, which is why it appears to have such a steep drop.

The only thing I’ve done differently on my blog since January is attempt to be fairly regular with writing, and as you may know I’ve been bringing all of my content to my site rather than spreading it all over, and I’ve tried to maintain a certain level of quality with everything I’ve published here.  Combining those three things is what I believe made my site’s traffic increase as it has.  My actual numbers are nothing to brag about, to be sure, but so long as the trend continues in the right direction you could say that the experiment was a resounding success.

But, was I able to accomplish my goals?  Yes.  Here is what I said my goal was in January:

“I don’t have any hard number goals that I’d like to achieve, but I wouldn’t mind being able to buy myself one lunch per month off of this site’s ads. Seems like a low goal? Remember, this is a personal Web site with a very small number of subscribers, less then five-hundred posts, and I only manage to write on here when I find the time. So how much does a good lunch cost nowadays?”

In the very first month of my running this experiment I made enough to buy a lunch.  In fact, based on the amount I paid today for lunch at Panera Bread, I’d be able to afford two lunches for the month of January’s earnings.  Success!

But wait, in February I would have only been able to buy a little more than one lunch.  Still a success, but odd that the amount I made in February wasn’t more than it was in January, since my overall page views were higher.  Here’s why; the number of clicks on ads that I had in February was only half that of January.  The main reason, I believe, this occurred was because of search referrals.  The main way I make money from ads on this site would be through search referrals, especially since I show two sets of ads on those page views (which probably brings down my CTR in retrospect).  If the traffic I get from search engines decreases over the course of the month so will my earnings.

Thrilling I know, but there’s more.

What about March?  March was, statistically, the best month this site has had in at least a year.  March was much better than February but still not quite as good as January.  While traffic from search engines did indeed increase, it didn’t increase enough to make up for the losses incurred in February, or even to match that of what was made in January.

Now we’re onto April.  You’ve probably painted a camel-like graph for yourself in your head with January and March being the humps and February being the valley in the middle.  So, where will April end up? With the month already half over, this site has made more than all of February, and almost as much as all of March.  I believe the month of April’s earnings will end up being slightly more than that of January.

What I’ve actually learned

Ads don’t have to be obtrusive to make money. The most important thing when serving ads is that you serve them to people that are most likely to click on them.  If you show an ad to 1,000 people that won’t click on it, you’ve just decreased your CPM average.  Context is also very important, but Google takes care of that for me.  However, if you’re reading this and in the middle of building your own ad system, know that properly serving an ad contextually is just as important as serving an ad to the right person.

I know what you’re thinking; this is advertising 101.  Not exactly.  I’m speaking of actually turning advertisements off if you think the person viewing the web site is not going to click the ads.  Do not even bother showing an ad to a person that will not click it.

And I’m not talking about demographics here.  I’m talking about scope.  If the person you are serving an ad to is there to see a very specific “thing”, and the ad is not well suited for that “thing”, you won’t get a click.  Plain and simple.  However, if the person you are serving an ad to is looking for something related to the ad, or is highly vested in something related to the ad, or even better yet is incredibly interested in something related to the ad – that’s when you’re going to get a click.

Here is the best example I can come up with on the fly.  If I’m reading an article on CNN.com, I don’t even notice the advertisements because I’m there to read the article.  However, if I’m looking for information, products, services, etc. that the article just happens to be about, and the ads are relevant, then the ads become part of the content.  The ads become valuable.

The second thing I learned is that having a lot of traffic doesn’t equate to more click-thrus.  February’s earnings dip is a perfect example.  Having a friend, or just about any other web site, link to you will not help the number of clicks you get on your ads.  If I was earning money based purely on CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, then it would, but not if I’m earning money solely on the CPC, or cost per click, model. (There are probably arguments to this, and I’d love to hear them.  The first thing that comes to mind is that the Long Tail will improve with Page Rank.)

Advertising will always be the most obtrusive when they are based only on number of impressions.  If I was earning money on CPM, I’d be showing an ad at every opportunity.  In fact, I’d probably put them right in the middle of my post.  This is why advertisements based on only on CPM should be replaced by poignant sponsorship campaigns that make sense.  More on this at another time.

New goals and some changes

I think I’m going to make some changes to the way I handle search engine referral page views.  As of right now I show an ad both at the top and the bottom of the post.  I think I might adjust it so that I only show an ad on the top of the post and not at the bottom.  This way I’m not showing two ads, which “fluffs” the impressions statistic, and lowers my CTR average.  I am not sure if this will help or hurt me, but I’m open to suggestions here if any of you have experience.

My new goal is that my earnings per month increases at a rate of at least 10% per month.  So if I make $1.00 this month, I want to make $1.10 next month.  I don’t even know if this is possible or plausible.  But it is a goal nonetheless, and a measure at which to weigh this experiment when I revisit it in the future.

If you have any comments, suggestions, tips, or tricks – please share them in the comments.  Hey, by commenting you don’t have to see the ads at all, so why not?

So here is how the ads work, why I’m doing it, and what my goals are.

How my system of ad placement works

I believe pretty strongly in the fact that subscribers, or frequent visitors, to a Web site do not really click on ads that often. Unless of course the ads are served in a personal way like on The Deck. The Deck has some really great products and services that are advertised across its network. Their motto is: “We won’t take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service.” so the author of the site the ad is being displayed is essentially saying that they vouch for that product or service.

Unfortunately, I’m not on The Deck, and I don’t get to pick and choose which ads Google decides to display on my site beyond their context. So I’ve come up with the following rules for how I display my ads, maybe they’ll work, may they won’t.

Ads display to the following people:

• … that come from a search engine (i.e. Google, Yahoo)
• … people that have not commented on my site

Pretty simple set of rules really. I have never, ever tried to boost this site’s traffic beyond just my writing so my site doesn’t get an enormous amount of traffic and as such I don’t really expect to make a ton of money off of displaying ads. But I figured by using these two simple rules, I’d be keeping the experience exactly the same for people that either come to my site often or participate in the conversations.

Oh, also of note: If you get to this site via a search engine, I double the number of ads you see and I even bring them up above the fold. Ads displayed above the fold normally do much better than those below, but frankly I think they are ugly, so I limit the number of times I do that to only hits that come directly from a search.

Why I’m doing it

This is an experiment, of sorts. Through the entire months of January and perhaps February I’ll be leaving this ad system on to see what type of return I can muster without being 1-bit obtrusive to the regular “audience”. If you visit this site regularly, you will probably see a single ad below the post. If you comment, you won’t see an ad. So it shouldn’t affect too many of you reading this right now.

My “return on investment” from all of you reading this, to date, has been in the conversations we’ve had and in general those coming from search engines do not take part in the conversation. We’ve talked about the traffic I get from Google Images and I wanted to somehow get some sort of return on that traffic. Again, I have no idea if this will work – but we’ll see.

What my goals are

I don’t have any hard number goals that I’d like to achieve, but I wouldn’t mind being able to buy myself one lunch per month off of this site’s ads. Seems like a low goal? Remember, this is a personal Web site with a very small number of subscribers, less then five-hundred posts, and I only manage to write on here when I find the time. So how much does a good lunch cost nowadays?

I hope you all understand my reasons for doing this experiment and that it works well enough to stay out of your way. I guess the only thing I can say is, if you don’t like the ads, comment!

PS. If you don’t see any ads on this site, that means the ad system is working.

I don’t have to pay for hosting at this site (the fine folks at Sonnex Hosting do that for me, and I appreciate it very much) – but that doesn’t mean I’m not mindful of the amount of bandwidth I am sucking up. But this isn’t the only reason I’d like to dump Google Images search.

Many of these “hits” are due to my site loading in the Google Images search “frame set” which loads a thumbnail preview of the image you clicked along with the page that the image appears on. Essentially, it is an empty hit. This traffic has very little value to me.

On one hand you might think I could turn on Google Adsense on this site to hopefully make a few dollars from this traffic. Perhaps I could even go one step further and turn on Google Adsense for only those visiting from Google Images search. After thinking about that though, I don’t think they’d ever see them – let alone click on them – since my site is loading in a frame.

So far this isn’t such a big problem that I need to do something quickly or rash. But I would really like some feedback if anyone has dealt with this in the past.

[tags]p2p, advertising[/tags]