> Small sites can put in the effort to make deals with individual advertisers and bake it right into the page.

Say I run a blog, by myself or maybe with one other person. Even putting aside questions of my own limited time, are big companies going to deal with me? Is it practical for them to deal with me and a thousand other, individual small blogs?

If you run a blog now, how much money do you realistically expect to make?

I have a site that gets about 30k pageviews per month; I threw ads on it just to see what would happen. It makes something like $12/month. Even at minimum wage here, after hosting costs I could afford to spend approximately zero time on it.

So I think for small sites, the answer is effectively the same with algorithmic ads or directly sold ads: you won't make enough to matter either way.

> I have a site that gets about 30k pageviews per month; I threw ads on it just to see what would happen. It makes something like $12/month

This seemed surprisingly low to me, so I did a little Googling.

https://blog.adstage.io/google-display-ads-cpm-cpc-ctr-bench...

> In Q1 2018, [AdWords] advertisers paid $2.8 dollars per thousand impressions

So for a site with 30K monthly page-views, I'd expect something closer to $84 per month with one ad per page. Place an ad on both the top and bottom of each page, and now it's $168 per month. Still not a ton by any stretch, but an extra 2K in income each year is nothing to sneeze at.

Ad rates are continually dropping, so I'm sure the current figure is lower. And you're assuming a random blogger would get the same kind of yield as the mostly professional participants in the ad network there.

And even if you're right, an extra $2k in income would only be nothing to sneeze at if the ROI is decent. But competition for eyeballs is fierce. There's a reason that even professional writers are having a hard time making ends meet.

... and it makes a world of difference for some people.

Ad clearinghouses are a flattening and democratizing force on the Internet that I don't think people recognize as such. They let people who otherwise couldn't really afford to pay for server space put up their content.

You could instead look at tailoring your ads to your page. Early website advertising was mostly tailored to the content at hand.

If you wrote a blog about leatherworking and wanted some ad money, you could go to a leatherworking tool company and say "I have this much traffic and its 100% people interested in your product because why else would they be on my website reading about this niche leatherworking technique that only you and I and my audience care about, lets make a deal." I bet that pitch would land a handshake.

With streamers/influencers being an entire industry these days, there are probably a lot of boutique agencies who do all this legwork of connecting company with highly specific products to your interested niche audience for you. And if the model changed where this would be how advertising is now done, you would see a lot more of these advertising agents at every economic spectra making these deals on behalf of any sized company or website.

    If you wrote a blog about leatherworking and wanted some 
    ad money, you could go to a leatherworking tool company 
    and say "I have this much traffic and its 100% people
    interested in your product becaus

I used to run a website with a "bespoke" approach to ads like this.

It does not work.

For this approach to work, you need somebody who...

1. Is good with the actual subject matter (leatherworking or whatever)

2. Is a strong writer/communicator

3. Has the "salesperson" personality to go and promote their blog to potential companies

4. Has the TIME to promote their blog to potential companies, deliver metrics so they know what kind of exposure they're buying, etc

5. Has the appropriate technical chops to run/publish a blog, handle ads, set up analytics, etc.

Those are disparate skillsets. You are going to exclude an AWFUL lot of good leatherworkers who'd otherwise be good at this. Sure, the occasional unicorns who combine these skillsets exist.

Just like there are a certain number of people in the world who are competitive skateboarders and... are also taekwondo masters or world-class violinists or something.

And if you're lucky maybe 0.1% of that remaining 0.1% will actually have the time to pursue something like the venture you describe, which tends to rule out folks who are already working 40+ hour weeks and have kids and such.

In reality, we're talking about an operation involving several full-time people with a breadth of skillsets to make this kind of operation a sustainable business.

A lot of podcasts and streamers do kinda make this work, but are generally part of networks and in the end are still beholden to advertisers whose businesses are an odd fit with the subject matter at hand anyway -- like all the tech and true-crime podcasts who sell ads to Stamps.com. It's not really the smoothly-integrated seamless bespoke ad paradise you want.

Just look at how long ring doorbells has supported this week in * podcasts (Leo Laporte) before the acquisition by Amazon.com. Ithink if you're influential enough,the advertisers come to you.

Also now they've effectively censored you about the dangers of paying to have a spy camera in your house that collects all footage and sends it to law enforcement (and anyone else with access).

Sorry. I was unclear.

When I wrote "small sites" I wasn't thinking about single person blogs but rather about smaller newspapers and similar.

As far as I know there was a golden age for technical blogging but today I personally wouldn't even try to earn money that way.

Thanks for clarifying.

Even for slightly larger organizations, I'd wager the extra work required to procure you're own agreements is a significant expense. Local newspapers (for example) often run on razor thin margins.

While it's true that print newspapers also had to obtain their own ad agreements, they had a lot of other revenue sources back then too. Classifieds were a huge one; another was that issues weren't free for users. Hence how they're struggling.

Podcasts are another medium that require bespoke advertising agreements. And smaller creators have found a solution—combine to form larger "podcast networks" that collectively handle advertising agreements.

This seems to be working, but it also runs counter to your goal of a more decentralized internet. As I see it, the logical end-game in the podcast space is for networks to keep combining with each other in order to take advantage of economies of scale. Eventually, the entire Podcasting space will be dominated by a handful of major networks—or, Spotify will just take over everything, and any semblance of podcasting as an open platform will disappear.

> While it's true that print newspapers also had to obtain their own ad agreements, they had a lot of other revenue sources back then too. Classifieds were a huge one; another was that issues weren't free for users.

Good points, and interesting.

Hopefully an equally interesting counterpoint:

Publishing and distribution today is a fraction of the cost of paper based media.

> - I strongly believe that the value of customized ads has been overhyped. And with that I mean to the ad buyer, not to Google: I've only seen relevant ads from Google once or twice a year for the last 10 years or so.

Its not customized ads to YOU, but its customized ads to a particular audience, which may or may not include you. That audience might include a bunch of people who are extremely likely to buy things, and it definitely moves the scales for those companies.

Google and Facebook work diligently and at great expense to make sure that not too many people are "turned off" by ads - an example is even recently how Google rolled back its search results ad UX change after the outcry started to pick up stream. It would be an existential threat for them if everyone started moving towards ad blocking. So they simply keep people from getting to that threshold.

If they work diligently and at great expense, then maybe they are just missing a signal here? I have an idea for an interesting one:

Maybe if they would look at the feedback they got on the ads (yep, people taking the effort to click on that tiny tiny x in the top right corner of the ad) where people said that the ad were irrelevant or even offensive. Maybe if they started with the assumption that these people knew what they were doing and hadn't managed to hit that specific combination by random chance and especially not three times or more in a row. And maybe if they had removed these users from the group that got said ads then that could be a good starting point for further work.

I'm no machine learning expert by any means but taking into account the current situation there should be some room for improvement.

If anyone missed it: I'm sarcastic. I believe ads targeting are either out of control, or Google as a company aren't as smart as they think they are or they have a really deep disregard for users.

I don't think Google did roll back their main change, hiding/masking the result URLs. What they said was "We always want to make Search better, so we’re going to experiment with new placements for favicons." Sure enough, for me the icons are gone, but that's not what I care about. I mainly use DDG, which has icons that are often useful, and which has proper result URLs that are IMO essential.

Besides, Google etc. turned me off ads years ago, so they didn't work diligently enough.