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A comment on How internet ads work. Parent comment

Re:How internet ads work by pc86 on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @09:12AM (#21524228)
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.

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Re:How internet ads work by edmundsauto on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @12:44PM (#21527046)
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

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Re:How internet ads work by pc86 on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @02:00PM (#21528007)
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.
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Re:How internet ads work by edmundsauto on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @06:31PM (#21530984)
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.)
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