Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right. You're asking sites to remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users.

Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety of ad bids, and the highest bidding ads are chosen for placement programmatically.

Edit: I just visited vogue.com. Guess who served me my ad? doubleclick. It was relevant and I bet it was programmatic. Programmatic does not mean random. Ad placement programs have a lot more data to work with than any individual at the publisher. There's a lot more sense to it than manual prediction

Does this become less true the more niche the website is? People who read my math blog should be served ads for technical things (math books, online courses, etc), regardless of recent search history.

In reality, I have a math blog with ads for Cap'n Crunch cereal and strange new yogurts which seem very distracting and poorly-targeted when compared to, say, ads for O'Reilly math/CS books or a MOOC on probability and statistics.

>I have a math blog with ads for Cap'n Crunch cereal and strange new yogurts

Seems like to me the algorithm gods decided that your site was better suited to advertise to parents of toddlers.

> remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users.

Yes, that's a move toward integrity and away from endangerment and excess income.

If "some higher up in marketing" doesn't understand their users, the problem is they're out-of-touch and that should be corrected, as opposed to endangering user's privacy.

Currently, my tiny site operates this way, with hand-chosen Amazon ads and no google Adwords.

>excess income

I don't think this a problem most small publishers have.

They need to realize that eventually the market will drive their users elsewhere. Content is king and there is more content elsewhere.

If you provide a worse user experience with the same content as another, then income will dwindle altogether.

Innovate, move forward.

If you have an interest in the 3rd party web, you should have an interest in a functional ad technology industry. The market might just drive small publishers out of business. Or drive them and their customers to walled-gardens, so we'll be reading their content on Facebook, being served Facebook ads.

And I'm not a fan of going back to AOL. But the ad tech industry and the "small publishing" industry is lazy and greedy. And I won't support them if they treat me like a product. If they don't I will support them.

I'd like to see Netflix for written content and I'd pay for it.

There are lots of automatic ways to make money like this, even more so on the cost side of a business. They are always going to look great on a spreadsheet but what you're missing is the opportunity cost of all the people that are turned off by the experience. They will fade away in a manner that's harder to measure than CTR.

I suppose that the decrease in daily / weekly / monthly audience is easily detectable.

Probably it's not very realistic to hand-pick individual ads, unless you run a very niche site. Probably it's still realistic to hand-pick the automatic ad streams you'd agree to show. I suspect the major ad networks allow you to be quite specific.

Podcasts do this very thing and it's lucrative enough for the lot of them to stay afloat while providing great content. The only thing I'd say sucks about it is the price for curated ads are probably prohibitively high compared to highly targeted, algorithmically picked ones.

> Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right.

Not in my experience. My hand-picked ads are alway at a higher CTR than programmatic. Intent-driven programmatic gives me a 2x CTR over random static ads. Hand tuned gives me about 10x more CTR.

You may be able to optimize down a set of hand-picked ads programmatically, but you still need that manual curation in the process.

More important is losing your audience to a bad user experience via programmatic ads when they visit your site.

Also, I'm pretty sure Vogue or the advertisers use DoubleClick as just the ad hosting network for analytic purposes. They are likely sold on a display basis in Vogue.

Good point. A combination of handpicked optimization and programmatic, intent-driven placement is likely optimal.

I would love to do this on my personal blog, but how? I'm just a guy with a niche Wordpress blog who doesn't have the time to negotiate and search for ad deals.

What I really want is a service that can match me with advertising firms based on the content of my site, and do the negotiations for me. And give me a means with which to contest ads if I find they're not appropriate, or the matching itself if I discover my matched company is doing something immoral.

There are a few minor, but significant differences between this and programmatic ads. Do those differences make it good, or at least neutral? Does such a company exist?

This was actually my plan (sort of) for my online sci-fi strategy game Neptune's Pride when I ditched AdSense.

I was going to hand select things on Amazon that my players would be interested in. Science Fiction books, dvd box sets, that kind of thing. Then present them to the players with my affiliate code where I would normally show a google ad.

I didn't fully implement the idea because I think the affiliate rewards are so small I was worried the math didn't make it worthwhile. But I'd still like to try one day.

This method is not really for product affiliate ads (unless you have a whole shopping section of your site devoted for that...). Amazon links are for penny-chasers anyways.

You're really supposed to curate display ads. But, this means you'll have to make the call to your local advertisers to actually sell the ads. ("Hey do you want to place an ad on our site for 6 months for $500? I'll take you out for pizza & beer if you're interested so we can talk details.") You're not going to sell display ads to Amazon, but you might for your local gaming shop.

Selling all your inventory this way is incredibly unrealistic for most people.

Then focus on developing an audience. Don't even bother chasing pennies for programmatic ads.

Once you have your audience, it becomes easier to sell ads this way.

Depends on your product/service category. There are sole operators making $x0k/mo from Amazon's affiliate program because they picked an overlooked category and promoted big ticket items. 5% of a $15 book is a pittance, but 5% of something that's $x00 is a different story.

My company's blog does this for related products that we don't personally sell in our online shop. It's good to the tune for $10k/year without trying much, but you have to get good at writing the copy into real blog posts, not just random spam. It works pretty well. Conversion rate post-click of about 8.5% this month.

If you don't mind, please drop a link to your company blog. It's good to see examples.

My current setup blocks almost all ads by simply blocking trackers. It's ridiculous, really, since there is no targeted adblocking going on.

The only ads I see are native ones like you describe, and they're usually actually useful.

What blocker are you using, and what config?

Set Ghostery to block everything and opt-out of info sharing. Almost all ads magically disappear.

Basically yes. I also have httpsEverywhere and a newly added Privacy Badger, but they don't seem to change anything.

Maybe I can crowdsource some help from here then - My SO has a food blog [1] which it would be nice if it were self sustaining (so ~$30USD/month for domains/hosting). She's just put up Amazon affiliate links on select articles and is still working on building traffic.

Should I stay away from AdSense? Where am I going to find the ads to "hand-pick"?

[1]: http://thecinnamonscrolls.com

A wise thing to do with sites like these is to procure the cheapest hosting you can (for a static or wordpress site, think $2 a month) and similarly cheap domain provision (although the prices don't vary so much for these). With the right provider the users will not think that the site is noticeably slower and you won't need such high monetisation targets to break even. Then, as the site gains traffic, simply scale the level of hosting accordingly.

I hope this is of use! Sam

$30/month is high monetisation?

In my understading the author doesn´t have any problems with programmatic ads. He has a problem with tech companies using the same tech like programmatic ads, ignoring the laws and the right of users, helping goverments to bypass the laws and the right of users, camping billions abroad to avoid paying taxes but at the same time investing in important projects solving burning issues like the search for immortality or nuking other planets.

That would work for an independently wealthy individual blogger. Otherwise for a blog with a sales team with aspirational dreams, when the Flash SSD advertiser expresses interest in advertising, he'll go for the deal to make his commission. As the owner of the blog, you block enough such deals, and you'll have yourself a never ending sales exodus

If your salesmen are suggesting SSD ads for your high-production-value female-fashion-and-lifestyle site, you need to pay more for better salesmen

If you're a content farm then rock on

That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands.

Ad networks work by letting you select categories, but not much more. Obviously that's because they want to keep control and maximize short-term revenues.

>> "That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands."

Unfortunately, you have just reinvented publisher-direct deals, a mainstay of many ad networks for the past decade.

Why would Vogue show you an SSD ad unless they've got data suggesting you want to see it?

I think that's precisely his point; even if Vogue has an ad network with highly accurate data that points you being interested in SSDs, Vogue is probably not the right place to put that ad. It's kind of a philosophical question - do you want to see ads that are relevant to your primary interests at ALL TIMES, or do you want to see ads that are relevant to the interests of where you are. There are, let's simplistically say, three classes of ads:

1. Old Internet - Pages curate and/or sell whatever ads they can possibly get. They are generally statically hosted assets. 2. Original Ad Networks - They don't know anything about you, but it removes the need for pages to individually make ad contracts. You'll get whatever ads are in the queue, possibly sorted by rough groupings; "technology" ads, etc. 3. Current Situation - Everywhere you go you are presented with ads relevant to your interests, regardless of your current site. Vogue might try to show SSD ads or car parts ads, even though that's not the kind of content you would go to Vogue to consume.

I think there's an interesting case to be made that clickthrough decreases can be at least partially attributed to the fact that as tracking increases the probability that the ad represents the content of the site decreases and becomes an even more unwelcome distraction. Sponsored content is a way to defeat this, and ad blocking, by making the advertising appear more in line with the content of the site (or is it making the content of the site more in line with the advertising?).

Why would Vogue show an SSD ad at all? What does Vogue know about SSDs? Nothing. Why would I think that an ad for SSDs on Vogue tells me anything about the quality of the SSD they're hocking? It's non-information and communicates nothing about the product beyond the fact that it exists. Anyone who knows what an SSD is knows where they can buy an SSD - what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy and an SSD ad on Vogue doesn't give me any information in that regard.

Your complaints have nothing to do with Vogue, but with the uselessness of an ad in general. Even if a site were talking about SSDs, you wouldn't need an ad to tell you about them, would you?

Ad networks at the moment seem to mostly provide the service of showing me pictures of things I have bought, just in case I forgot that I already own them.

> what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy

In that case you need reviews, not ads.

Ads can also communicate something about the quality of a branch/product based on how much the ad cost to run and which publication chose to run the ad. This is no substitute for a review, but if I see a non-targeted ad for an SSD in a tech publication that chooses ads based on what it thinks is good (I'm describing The Deck basically) it at least assures me that this SSD is not a hunk of garbage. Again this is not a lot, but a targeted ad tells me nothing.

On the flip side of this, if Vogue let any old crap run as advertising in their magazine this would be a form of reputation mining - trading their good name (earned after years of operation) for some short-term profit, but no-one bats an eye when the same thing happens online even though it's subtly devaluing online properties that do the same.

How about more intelligent programs?

>The correct answer is to never

Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing:

what programming language should I use?

what should the next move of my business be?

is she really the one, or should I move on?

Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.

Not the comment parent, but I can also prescribe absolutely correct answers to complex situations via simple platitudes. There's a Udacity course on it, I highly advise taking it, but since it takes so little time I'll just answer these questions for you.

>what programming language should I use?

Haskell.

>what should the next move of my business be?

If you're not in a Series C, growth hack; if you've done your Series C, look into the Caymans.

>is she really the one, or should I move on?

Have a divorce attorney on retainer, be ready to delete your Facebook account at a moment's notice, and ideally start going to the gym now, but with those preparations in mind pursue her as if she's the one.

>Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.

This isn't a question and I don't understand how to respond to it.

I know you're joking but this is on balance pretty solid advice.

I never joke.

I won't speak to the sarcasm-as-argument response, but I will say that there is a sentiment behind it that I do agree with.

I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach:

"I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'best practice', in my view, and that is simply to have practices that you and your team follow that serve to further your business goals and meet your business requirements. SharePoint isn't a best practice, but a system to support a corporate culture of collaboration or information sharing is a practice that many businesses can agree with. jQuery isn't a best practice, but using a framework that improves your team's productivity and helps it to meet your business' requirements - that's a good practice to follow."

We need a new phrase that gets the point across without the cognitive burden of being condescending and presumptuous. Consensus practice? Common practice? Popular practice? I don't know. But I know that "best" is a superlative that is too often used to disguise a marketing goal or to dazzle the listener/reader into accepting the superiority of the person using it.

Traditionally (at least I've first heard these phrases in a business context) "best practice" describes what very successful businesses do and "common practice" describes what the average business does.

I ignore this distinction and have just replaced "best practice" with "common practice" since I pretty much always want to say something along the lines of "this is how a lot of people do it, there's good reasons for it (list of reasons) but everything depends on context so critically reflect if it makes sense to follow these practices or not on an individual basis"

Depending on how it's used, I find "idiomatic" to be useful. Built into the meaning is that it may not translate to other areas, and most people understand that while it is a useful shorthand to making something succinct and expressive, you fall back to other things when it doesn't match well.

That's true, but I think in general if we had someone else making our decisions for us (obviously this is completely undesirable) they'd mostly be correct. Emotion plays a huge role in what we do, many times a negative role.