This is exactly why lower tier local newspaper "publications" started splitting already short articles into 3-5 pages, and why 10-item lists require 11 or 12 pageviews to read where pages 4 and 9 are just an ad.

For context, to get 12 million pageviews for a local newspaper website, if you're in a small metro of ~250k people with 5% readership, that means every single reader would need to generate nearly 1,000 pageviews a month each. Even at 2 pageviews per article, that's approaching 20 articles a day M-F.

What I don't understand is this -- when an article is split into 5 pages, sure there are 5x more ads loaded. But wouldn't they be worth 5x less money per impression, due to overloading the user? Maybe it's a nonlinear scaling -- 5x the ads is 4x the value. Or is it because these are "branding"* ads, and so nobody really measures the ROI on them?

* vs direct response

How would "overloading the user" be quantified when buying the ads, though? Sure maybe you could calculate ROI from the ads like you mentioned, or track some other engagement metric, but by then you've already paid for the ads.

It's a recurring purchase, not a one-time thing. So each month/quarter/year, there's a decision whether to continue investing in each channel. (These decisions are often not made well, but that's another issue.)

Does it even make sense to advertise online? I know that sounds like a dumb question but despite being told that ads DO work on me I don't think I've ever bought a single thing online because of an ad.

If I want to advertise my product or service I'm afraid it will just be me dropping a couple thow for ads that no one will ever click on. Maybe then the ad company would blame me for not having a compelling enough ad and I'll have just thrown away my money. I wish advertising were more formulaic so I had a better idea of how much I'll get out given how much I put in.

Alternatively, maybe online advertising can work if you think outside the box. But I have serious concerns about buying $2000 worth of customers from Facebook.

They don't necessarily have to work on you, they just have to work in general. HN itself is a bit of a bubble, for anyone on here it is likely they want to intentionally avoid internet ads more than the average person.

I work in ads for the airline space, I'm on the engineering side so I can't give great financial numbers offhand, but we usually do trial runs on just subsets of routes an airline offers, and for every customer so far the increased revenue on those routes heavily outweighed the new ad spend. Of course you can make bad ads, just like you're saying. We have departments dedicated to that though, I myself couldn't tell you too much about making a good ad that a few SEO blog posts wouldn't cover better.

But it can be formulaic to a degree. If you're an airline, give us some of your metrics and we can get a pretty good estimate of your ad performance at different levels. Got a SaaS product, video game, new snack? We're useless, but there's likely some company of analysts out there who have you covered.

I'm sure it's extremely variable by market though. Air travel has huuuge volume and lots of customers from every tech-proficiency level. I often get YouTube ads for B2B SaaS services and other extremely targeted business things, and I wonder who is signing a 20mm contract that started from a YouTube ad?? Maybe some other commenter will tell me it works though.

Edit: Actually, I signed up for Robert C Martin's (Uncle Bob) new software training video site recently because his youtube ads were so silly. It helps that I knew his name long before though, and I've yet to pay for one of the non-free ones.

"I wonder who is signing a 20mm contract that started from a YouTube ad??"

This is just a super common misconception among engineers that advertising is a very linear thing. Most ads are not direct response. Most of the time they're just trying to keep at the top of mind for specific groups of folks. So yeah you aren't going to just run out and buy a 20 million dollar piece of software because of a Youtube ad, but when it comes time to buy a solution in that space I bet you'll consider that product. When you think about the scale that this works at (It costs maybe a penny a view or $10 per thousand people reached) you really only need to hit 1 person at the right time across many millions upon millions of impressions to make it worth while. That's all. Many people just don't appreciate the scale of advertising and think it's more sniper rifle rather than carpet bombing especially for large B2B purchases.

Does a sniper rifle ever work? It sounds like ads aren't a good choice for an upstart with a new product (which is what I hope to be). Are there advertising channels better suited to people like myself?

Reddit advertising is pretty close to a "sniper rifle" (you target based on subreddits). It's cheap to get going and very respectful of the privacy and tracking of users.

I think it's not used more by big-co's because it's relatively a small audience.

I actually have one of the top of all time posts on r/redditads (their advertiser support subreddit) and have done a number of how to guides for Reddit ads. I'm a big fan, but honestly most larger companies don't use it yet because 1. They don't have a very sophisticated platform. It's a ton of work to do simple tasks and the analytics etc aren't particularly insightful.Media buyers and PPC specialists time is at a premium already so it's hard to justify adding in yet another platform that doesn't scale super well. 2. Reddit users are pretty hostile to ads still. 3. The traffic quality is a bit all over. Very high bounce, very high instance of ublock etc. so tracking is hard. That said the CPC is super cheap so it works out overall but some people get freaked out about the traffic.

Like I said I really like it but they have a ways to go to attract more mainstream users.

It can work it's just harder. If you're looking to advertise and you have a limited budget I would suggest Google search ads. Honestly though with limited budget you're likely better suited to doing some combination of PR + SEO + Content marketing and using the cash you would have spent on ads to enhance those efforts. Once you've got your funnel figured out then you can expand into paid advertising.

Im planning on advertising for a network security gadget I invented. You said you're "useless" in other domains. That's not good news for little old me who is going to try and make the ads himself.

I've heard about testing ads for your various demographics before you go all in on an advertising campaign. But it sounds like there is even more to it.

Why do you feel like you would be useless in another domain? Surely you would do better than some geek off the street.

It does work. Despite the anti advertising rhetoric of Hacker News users advertising can and does grow many brands very quickly and profitably. I think you've hit on some reasons in your post why though many people fail at advertising. They want it to be a linear sort of thing when in reality it mirrors more of a exponential success or failure sort of model (not unlike startups) instead. Your creative and audience have to match and your offer has to be extremely compelling to get someone cold. It's also notable that direct response advertising, which many people conflate with the overall ads ecosystem is a actually a very small piece of the pie as it were. Most larger brands are fine losing money on a first interaction or sale because they have a good handle on CLTV. That said this specific article is about things like mobile app ads and website banners. It's actually much easier to succeed in walled garden environments like Facebook etc.

You don’t have to buy it online, just raising awareness or influencing an offline purchase are also goals for online advertisements.

Across large groups it can approach being more formulaic where FB et al. will show you predicted # of conversions based on your inputs before you start a campaign. Of course you are trusting their estimation process then.

Those ads aren't meant to make you buy something. They work in a more subtle way by shaping culture. It's a little difficult to explain what the purpose of that is and how it benefits the company. I recommend trying to read up on it, as it's pretty interesting, but will easily take you a few hours.

So if they are a macro tool does it make sense for me to use them when hocking my widgets?

12M isn't too far out of reach for a medium sized city, but definitely is for a small one.

If 75,000 people in your town read the paper, 5 page loads per day, every morning, that is 7.5MM pageviews per month.

If a few articles get read by people one town over, you have a few direct ad deals with local businesses, or your cpm is slightly above average, then you can make money.

Most local websites don't sell ads on the open market with cpm pricing, but do direct deals with local companies that cost something like $5,000/mo.

sorry but that 75k and that 5 are at least 2x too optimistic.

also, direct sales deals require direct sales people who then expect direct deposited bonuses. its kindof like the tyranny of the rocket equation, you can't afford sales people because they would have to take 95% of the revenue they generated just to pay their own (meager regional medium city ad sales) salary.

To put the math further in the red, isn't 33% crazy low overhead? The number I've generally heard is 100% overhead to pay for all benefits and support staff.

That’s an average price and mostly driven down by lack of data on users browsing the site and the mix of campaigns that bought, given retargeting campaigns can easily pay averages in the $5-10 CPM ranges depending on the campaign and users and data density. So the bad persistence of cookies is what largely drives this price to be low. Obviously anyone can choose how to take that.