On Advertising

I hate adver­tis­ing, yet I have adver­tise­ments on Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look as well as oth­er web­sites I host. Am I a hypocrite?

Per­haps. But first allow me to qual­i­fy my hatred of adver­tis­ing. I dis­like it because it tends to be a trade with an inher­ent sac­ri­fice of integri­ty for cash. Per­haps for a tele­vi­sion sta­tion it does­n’t mat­ter whose mon­ey they take because no one expects them to have an opin­ion. In some cas­es (polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing for exam­ple) they are required by law not to have an opinion.

That said, if I don’t care what a tele­vi­sion sta­tion does or does not believe, then I put no trust in what they tell me, and there­fore the val­ue of the adver­tise­ment is zero. It is wast­ed mon­ey. I won’t buy a car because I see an ad for it on tele­vi­sion; the influ­ence of that adver­tise­ment is minus­cule com­pared to the influ­ence of word of mouth or of review­ers online or in print. Gone are the days when adver­tise­ments con­tain actu­al prod­uct infor­ma­tion, so with­out a trust­ed voice pro­vid­ing the endorse­ment, an adver­tise­ment is often best ignored.

Like­wise when an ath­lete or celebri­ty endors­es a prod­uct for mon­ey one has to won­der whether they use that prod­uct because they are paid to or because they would chose to if they were buy­ing it with their own mon­ey. Or even whether they actu­al­ly do use the prod­ucts they endorse.

One must also look at the effect that adver­tise­ment has on the con­tent that the adver­tise­ment sup­ports. Even when there is a fire­wall between edi­to­r­i­al and adver­tis­ing in an orga­ni­za­tion, the laws of sup­ply and demand dic­tate that the con­tent that sur­vives will be the con­tent that serves the adver­tis­er rather than the consumer.

There­fore I pre­fer forms of enter­tain­ment and infor­ma­tion where I can pay a flat amount up-front and not have to look at adver­tise­ments. Just as I buy books I enjoy and am hap­py to con­tin­ue pay­ing so that the authors can con­tin­ue writ­ing, I want the movies a stu­dio makes and the TV shows a net­work pro­duces to be the direct result of the rev­enue I pro­vide by pay­ing for the content.

Why I bother trying to get money

Even for sites with as small a reach and read­er­ship as mine, host­ing is not free. I pay out hun­dreds of dol­lars every year to pub­lish these sites and spend dozens of hours every month main­tain­ing the servers and mak­ing sure that the sites are run­ning and with load times that aren’t abysmal. These sites are a labor of love and I don’t expect to sup­port myself with them. I would how­ev­er like for them to pay for their own host­ing even if not the time it takes to main­tain them. That means find­ing revenue.

Web-based con­tent is very infre­quent­ly sold direct by sub­scrip­tion, and hid­ing web con­tent behind a pay wall is a sure tick­et to obscu­ri­ty for any con­tent provider small­er than, say, the Wall Street Jour­nal. Adver­tis­ing of some sort or anoth­er is pret­ty much the only option.

Can a site with ads be trustworthy?

Because I want the vis­i­tors to my sites to have a good expe­ri­ence and also because I believe that my sites have the best val­ue when I — and by exten­sion the sites — can be trust­ed, I’m mak­ing some rules about adver­tis­ing on the sites I host.

First, that there is no fire­wall between edi­to­r­i­al con­tent and adver­tis­ing con­tent. I can’t avoid the appear­ance that I’m sell­ing my endorse­ment for mon­ey but I can turn it on its head and declar­ing that I’ll only take mon­ey for that which I can hon­est­ly endorse. Almost any adver­tise­ment that goes onto the site is an adver­tise­ment that I have per­son­al­ly approved (I’ll get into specifics lat­er.) I’ve always done at least some check­ing to see that an adver­tis­er on one of my sites is wor­thy of my endorse­ment. If you have any rea­son to believe that an adver­tis­er on my sites ought not be sup­port­ed, by all means con­tact me and I’ll take a clos­er look. I might very well pull the ad.

My sites have now moved to an entire­ly affil­i­ate-based ad sys­tem. I don’t get paid to show ads. I get paid when peo­ple trust what I have to say enough to fol­low the links or ban­ners and buy the prod­uct sold on the oth­er side. I’ve dis­con­tin­ued AdSense, have set up my own ad serv­er, and have spent a not-incon­sid­er­able time estab­lish­ing affil­i­ate rela­tion­ships with select­ed ven­dors of goods and services.

The best use of these affil­i­ate part­ner­ships is to link to prod­ucts that I men­tion. When review­ing books, for exam­ple, a link to that book on Ama­zon (and oth­er part­ners such as Kobo for the Kobo Read­er, Alib­ris as an alter­nate to Ama­zon, and the Apple iTunes Book Store) is some­thing I con­sid­er use­ful to my read­ers as well as good for me if I can get a lit­tle per­cent­age out of the sales that my review inspired.

There is lit­tle wor­ry that I might decide only to review books that are avail­able from affil­i­ate deals. There are very few instances where a book is entire­ly unavail­able. My prac­tice is to review books that I read and to review every book that I read. A link to a book does not mean that I liked it; you’ll have to read my book report to know what I thought of it.

Banners

A some­what more sticky ques­tion, and the one that this arti­cle real­ly means to address, is what about the ban­ner ads that do not cor­re­spond to a spe­cif­ic prod­uct that I’ve mentioned?

As men­tioned above and in the inter­ests of total trans­paren­cy, there are a few cir­cum­stances where an ad I have not approved may still show. To main­tain vari­ety in the ads that are shown, I do allow some ran­dom ads both from select­ed sources and from adver­tis­ers I have select­ed but which include ads I may not have indi­vid­u­al­ly approved. At present (and these num­bers are like­ly to vary from day to day and from site to site) my ad serv­er pre­dicts that 1.56% of all ban­ner ads will be cho­sen from a ran­dom pool of unknown adver­tis­ers and 7.81% of all ban­ner ads will be a ran­dom ad that I may or may not have specif­i­cal­ly approved, but from a ven­dor that I have approved. For the most part, the ads that I’ve seen come through the ran­dom process­es have been just fine, but I have con­trol to fil­ter out ads that I choose not to allow. If you see any­thing that seems out of place or offen­sive, please con­tact me and I’ll look into it.

The process of select­ing affil­i­ate part­ners has not involved inflex­i­ble rules, but it is a process under­tak­en with inten­tion and con­scious choice. Not every ad part­ner is one that I think is a per­fect fit, but each one has intrigued me in some way with­out chas­ing me away. Red­Bub­ble, for exam­ple, is not a com­pa­ny with much direct rela­tion to the con­tent of my sites, but their ads are taste­ful and the t‑shirts they sell are fun and fun­ny. So why not?

On the oth­er hand, per­haps at some point I ought to list each of my adver­tis­ers with a para­graph or so explain­ing why I chose to make a deal with them specifically.

Alternate revenue models

The next step is to pro­vide options to opt out of ads. Read­ers of new con­tent are not the rea­son that I have to pay real mon­ey for host­ing; it’s anony­mous search engine traf­fic find­ing posts from years ago. That’s fine and good, but real­ly that’s the rea­son that rev­enue is impor­tant. So I pre­fer to show ads to anony­mous traf­fic and give pref­er­en­tial treat­ment to the vis­i­tors that show an inter­est in what the sites offer and come back again and again.

Those repeat vis­i­tors are actu­al­ly the peo­ple most like­ly to click on some­thing I’ve rec­om­mend­ed and buy it, so it would be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to sim­ply not show ads to logged-in vis­i­tors. Instead my sites will offer the option to hide half the ads if logged in, on any site or page which has more than one ad on it. Just by cre­at­ing an account and using it to log in, you will have the option to dis­able all but one of the ads on a page. (All but two if there would nor­mal­ly be four ads on a page, but I’m lean­ing away from putting that many ads on any page.) This option can be turned on or off on the user pro­file page.

Final­ly, an option to remove all ads: I’ll be offer­ing a «pre­mi­um» mem­ber­ship lev­el which would add the option to remove all ads by switch­ing to a sub­scrip­tion mod­el. The details are not worked out, and I don’t know whether pric­ing would be per site or for all sites — the lat­ter seems to be a bet­ter idea (if for no oth­er rea­son than it would encour­age mem­bers from one site to check out the oth­er sites) but it would be more work to make that happen.

Anoth­er pos­si­ble ben­e­fit that could be offered to pre­mi­um sub­scribers would be access to faster load-bal­anced servers. It’s an inter­est­ing idea, but it prob­a­bly won’t go beyond the stage of «inter­est­ing idea» until such time as there is enough traf­fic that I have to increase the amount I pay for Con­tent Deliv­ery Net­works and the like. I sus­pect that won’t be the imme­di­ate future.

The sub­scrip­tion rate would nec­es­sar­i­ly be low; peo­ple are unac­cus­tomed to pay­ing for con­tent on the Web. But even a small amount of rev­enue would pro­vide jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to put more effort in to mak­ing the sites bet­ter, with more well-thought-out design, fresh­er con­tent, and more com­pelling features.

It’s not all figured out

My think­ing about adver­tis­ing will like­ly evolve over time. These rules and ideas about adver­tis­ing on these sites are sub­ject to revi­sion. But one thing will not change: the pur­pose of the adver­tise­ments are to bet­ter enable pro­vid­ing the best web­sites pos­si­ble. If the adver­tise­ments don’t serve that pur­pose, they will go away. This is the rea­son that the Google AdSense ads went away: they pro­vid­ed a total of less than ten dol­lars rev­enue per year. Over six years I nev­er reached Google’s thresh­old for cut­ting a check, so in essence I was giv­ing away adver­tis­ing. When I closed the account after six years I got a check for $58.

The switch to adver­tis­ing based on affil­i­ate part­ner­ships allows greater con­trol over the ads dis­played, which helps me to use them to sup­ple­ment the sites’ con­tent rather than sim­ply clut­ter up the sites.

My affil­i­ate part­ners are Apple Media Ser­vices (Part­ner­ize), shareasale.com and Rakuten Link­share. My ads are man­aged and served by Revive Adserv­er, an open-source ad serv­er host­ed on my own server.

Disclosures

Apple: I’ve got too much Apple stuff to list. I have nev­er received free or dis­count­ed mer­chan­dise in return for men­tions or ad ban­ners. I receive a com­mis­sion based on clicked links that turn into sales. The Affil­i­ate rela­tion­ship is with Apple Media Ser­vices (Part­ner­ize).

DasKey­board: I own two, and have nev­er received free or dis­count­ed mer­chan­dise in return for men­tions or ad ban­ners. I receive a com­mis­sion based on clicked links that turn into sales. The Affil­i­ate rela­tion­ship is with Rakuten Linkshare.