[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Is this a feasible idea or rather not?
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Ask HN: Is this a feasible idea or rather not?
Hello HN, I have a pretty weird idea and I'm wondering if it is
technically feasible: advertising is in my opinion poison for the
mind and I avoid it where I can. At the same time I use lots of
sites and services that are ad powered and I am blocking ads
knowing full well that I deprive these providers from a revenue
stream. But ads are just too obnoxious. Would it be possible to
create a service that serves up 'blank' content (let's call it
'whitespace') in every ad spot on the sites that you visit but that
uses the same mechanism as the ad delivery services. So instead of
advertisers buying up the space _I_ would buy up the space on the
sites that I visit creating a revenue stream that is as good or
better than the one that advertisers would offer, effectively
crowding them out. OpenRTB or something like that would be a good
start to inject this because you could essentially become your own
agency there but I'm not sure how easy it would be to qualify for
bidding on a large enough segment to make it worth your while. And
on the off chance that an alternative channel would try to deliver
ads anyway that could simply be blocked. So, what's your judgment,
is this a viable proposition or not, and if not why not? And if it
were available would you use it?
Author : jacquesm
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-08-22 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
| hedora wrote:
| I would not use it. I object to the tracking networks that power
| targeted advertising, and believe supporting them is unethical.
|
| I would use a service that replaced all personalized ads with
| display ads however.
|
| Display ads are targeted to the content, not the consumer. Higher
| quality content attracts quality audiences, and commands higher
| prices per impression. This creates a financial incentive to
| create quality content instead of SEO spam and clickbait.
|
| Also, in my experience, display ads tend to be more relevant than
| personalized ads, but I regularly clear cookies, etc. I suspect
| people like me are a larger percentage of the addressable market
| than advertising networks admit.
| cpurdy wrote:
| This is a service that I would pay for. Even if I had to pay more
| than the advertisers would.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I think there would definitely be a market for this idea! In my
| mind, if we extend the idea, its a sort of subscription
| management. Maybe you pay the site manager directly for
| subscribing to content that lacks ads, or maybe there is a third-
| party that manages subscriptiopn management for smaller sites
| (who might not want to deal with overhead of managing paying
| users, etc.). Let's call this the Roku model, in that, i can use
| a Roku layer to help me manage video content...and then i use
| roku to manage payment to a paid streaming service, say, HBO.
| Sure, i can just directly pay HBO, but roku supposedly adds some
| value, maybe ease of management, or maybe roku promotes HBO
| signups, etc....in any case, i pay roku for access to HBO, and
| roku passes that subscription revenue to hbo - excluding some fee
| that they charge hbo i suppose, and on and on. So, in my
| estimation, this has precedent and can be applied to regular web
| content.
|
| However, i imagine over time there will be a centralization of
| these subscription manager services - we'll call them "middle
| men" - and over time they will squeeze ever more fees from
| brands/content destinations...and over time brands who gain
| enough market power will feel these middle men lack enough value
| to give them their fees, etc. you know, that old chestnut.
|
| Or...maybe i totally misunderstood your idea. ;-)
| verdverm wrote:
| "Google Contributor: can I really pay to remove ads? | Google |
| The Guardian"
| https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/21/google-co...
|
| The big G tried this, but seems the site is no longer available
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh, interesting, thank you! Never realized this was a thing
| already, it just seemed like an obvious thing to do, to just
| 'bid more'.
|
| Wonder what their figures were.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| I don't think people will pay for content. And the ones who will
| pay for content may be overwhelmingly attractive targets to
| advertisers in general? So you will never get any support from
| platforms for your "subscription ad-space buying service."
|
| But Youtube has something like 20 million premium subscribers -
| I'm one myself with a family plan. But that is against an
| estimated 2.6 _billion_ active users. Like, 1%? Round up and call
| it 2%.
|
| I wonder how many of those 2% of users are the _most attractive
| and desired targets of advertisers_?
|
| OTOH, if you said to me you had a service that would bid like 1%
| more for the adspace on any site or service I consume and that
| $X00 per year would remove all ads from those sites or service I
| use . . . I'd buy that.
|
| Putting on my blackhat for a minute. I'm a creator with some
| small percentage of consumers "opting out" via this type of tool
| - how can I buy ads on my site/service at an inflated price to
| optimize my income . . . if I know 2% of my users are willing to
| pay X+1% shouldn't I try to drive up X? Arbitrage?
| paulcole wrote:
| 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).
| clusterhacks wrote:
| 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?
| jacquesm wrote:
| CTR is only relevant if it leads to revenue, if you can get
| revenue anyway why would you bother with the CTR?
| bigtech wrote:
| Seems possible from the technical side, but not so sure about the
| money part. if I'm following you correctly, XYZ.com would have
| shown an ad on their site and received, say 1 cent. With your
| service running, you visit XYZ.com, ad is replaced by a white
| box, and they receive, let's say 2 cents? If so, seems like
| efficient microtransactions will be a challenge.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's the idea, the microtransactions will be taken care of by
| the existing ad networks and will end up in the aggregate
| payment from the network to the site. Sites effectively won't
| even know that it is happening.
| treis wrote:
| I think it's a fantastic idea and wish to subscribe to your
| newsletter.
| soared wrote:
| Fun idea! I've worked in technical roles at agencies and DSPs
| (the tool brands use to buy programmatic ads), and currently work
| at a dsp. Here's my two cents:
|
| Assuming it's a good idea people will use, you'll run into a
| couple issues:
|
| 1. To build this you have to break a lot of privacy rules. You'd
| need to tie and individual user to all of their individual
| impressions (ad slots they viewed) on every site/page. Because
| you're billing them for the ad slots, you need to track and store
| their behavior, and be able to tie it to individual auctions.
| Privacy and technical difficulties everywhere.
|
| 2. Digital advertising is wildly complicated. You'd need to
| outbid every single other advertiser on every single impression.
| Because auction are first price now (rather than second price)
| it's going to be ridiculously expensive to accomplish this. At
| work I have advertisers with some impressions where we bid $200+
| cpm. ($0.20 per ad slot, so some page views would cost $1+).
|
| 3. This could actually work if you didn't guarantee 100% coverage
| and just said like "reduce ads on pages by 33% while still paying
| pubs". Then you build an audience segment of all your customers
| and just go to any dsp and bid on that segment until you reach
| the profit margin you want. Bill customers an average or just a
| monthly subscription to avoid tiring individual users to each of
| their impressions. (Although your creative will get
| denied/flagged because you must have accurate branding in the
| creative and it must clickthrough to that same brand's site)
|
| 4. This will probably be impossible after 2024ish when cookies
| are gone.
|
| 5. Users you do this probably clear their cookies or use the
| global opt out, which would make your system not work.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Good thoughts, but it is somewhat dependent on the
| implementation. There are other ways to implement than you
| describe.
|
| The solution doesn't need to be cookie based, as it can be a
| browser plugin, as it is tied to the user, and therefore, that
| gets around a bunch of the cookie issues.
|
| You're taking this from the "ad guy" perspective of this is how
| advertising works, but what about taking the publisher
| perspective of "how do I get paid for my content". They likely
| don't care if the money is coming from an advertiser or
| consumer. They may in fact prefer the consumer payment model.
|
| I don't think you can even begin with attempting to get 100%
| coverage. But if you can get adoption on a few larger, more
| visited sites, or within certain niches with certain
| individuals who particularly dislike advertising, it could
| spread from there.
|
| But...is this better than the direct subscription model for the
| publisher?
| brudgers wrote:
| I don't think it is feasible to block _all_ advertising because
| companies can raise prices to cover the cost of outbidding such a
| service and some potential customers have massive lifetime
| value...
|
| ...Amazon AWS comes to mind.
| vlod wrote:
| Maybe have the adblocker replace ads, with one of those "buy-me-
| a-coffee" links that you can click to submit a micropayment.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The replacement _is_ the payment.
| rank0 wrote:
| It's kinda like Brave right? I wish this were a reality but it's
| gonna be a tough battle. Micro transactions are a tough
| problem...and I definitely don't want to have to buy some silly
| crypto token.
|
| You're gonna need a team of engineers, lawyers, sales people,
| accountants and bankers...plus a shit load of capital.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The beauty of the scheme is you won't need micro transaction:
| the regular advertising money streams would suffice to make it
| work. You essentially function as an agency with a campaign
| spend to get rid of on behalf of an agency: the people paying
| for the service. All the rest would be taken care of by the
| existing channels.
| rank0 wrote:
| Oh I see that's an interesting idea.
|
| But you'll still need a way to send very small sums of money
| without an outrageous payment processing fee.
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