

Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay - prakash
http://www.adpinion.com/
Interesting YC startup plugging in "relevant ads". Check the bottom of any PG essay i.e.: <a href="http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html</a>
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Leon
Oh snap! I went to some random PG essay to see which ad agency PG would put up
and was immediately disappointed to see an ad for Mortgages, which was
entirely off-base for the page, but then an up/down mod appeared! What?! That
was awesome! Down clicking made a 'Sorry' box appear and the ad was gone!
Huzzah!

But still, what will happen when an advertisement that a group pays for is
consistently down-modded into oblivion, essentially nullifying any chance for
it to appear? How will the YC startup handle the irate company? I know an
answer would be that they should change their advertisements, but still, some
companies may get angry at the YC startup that the money they payed for
advertisement didn't do any good. How will they handle that situation? I'm
guessing the advertisements are charged on a per-click bases, but is there a
base charge, or tiered pricing for size of initial random viewing of web-pages
registered with the company?

If the YC startup can't fulfill a promise of at least some level of ad-viewer-
ship, then why should a company have their ads go through them?

~~~
byrneseyeview
So, what you're saying is "Who would want to be rewarded based on performance,
given that some people won't perform well?" I guess I might be irate if I said
"Let my customers tell me how good my ads are," and the answer was "They
suck," but wouldn't I be better off knowing, or at least having the option to
know?

~~~
Leon
Yes, a reasonable person would be glad to have such feedback, but I was more
curious of the Marketing Management reaction who would look at their ad click-
through's and notice that they aren't that high for a service they just paid
money for, or that they're ads aren't even being viewed anywhere at all.

I was just asking how an online advertising service, especially a small
startup, handle such things.

~~~
byrneseyeview
But what about the marketing manager's manager. If the marketing guy says "We
could use this new ad service -- but we'll only get clicks if users like our
ads, and that's not going to work out well for us," he'd deserve to lose his
job.

Nobody who says "the more accurately you judge my efforts, the worse off I'll
be" is worth keeping around.

~~~
Leon
I was trying to spark conversation along a different line of dialog, but maybe
I have been misunderstood. Yes, this new ad system is a great idea - instant
feedback and better, more specific targeting for individual websites and
viewers, and any ad/marketing group should love it. Yet a certain amount of
unpredictability remains, especially for ad click-through rates, and it is
this that I wanted to follow.

Right now, it is relatively easy for a company to sign up for an online
advertising service with some minimal guaranteed ad views. From that companies
can project future earnings based on their click through and purchase rates,
even if their ads are terrible, and nobody except for 0.1% click, they at
least have a base line for money coming in that is fairly reliable. This
system, however bad for the end users experience, is extremely helpful for the
businesses planning and forecasting. Now, the CFO can say, 'We're going to
have at least this much money!', and Net Ops groups can say, 'Well that means
we'll probably need this much bandwidth!', and the entire business can some-
what get along.

Then, Adpinion steps in. Suddenly, Advertising/Marketing can't predict how
much, or even if, they'll be able to meet previous projections, projections
are useless at this point. Now the CFO can't say if the company will be able
to meet market predictions, and the Net Ops guys will be in the dark about if
they'll suddenly be crushed by users' bandwidth requests or that they've over
allocated bandwidth and they're now stuck with some fat pipes that are just
getting spam messages. Well, this is all a little dire, but the point is that
Adpinion can create contentions in a business.

Ah! But here is what I wanted to follow through on - even if Adpinion can
create unpredictability in long running advertising strategies, the real win
here would be for a one-two punch with traditional online advertising venues.
A business could market test half their advertising revenue, find what works
and then send it through traditional online ad streams. Now that business can
up their average click rate by quickly market testing ads, and they can make
their advertising team hungry and on-edge about what how well that
day/week/months' ad scheme performed. And this is where Adpinion wins, for me.
From an overall business perspective, outside of a localized ad/marketing
department, it would provide such a benefit to any company that they would be
senseless not to use it.

~~~
lukexi
Leon, yeah! We're excited about the potential for our Adpinion as a tool for
businesses to quickly evaluate the performance of their ads.

The issue of advertisements getting shown less because everyone dislikes them
is something we're looking at closely. We focus a lot on individual user
preferences, so if you dislike an ad hopefully there is someone out there who
likes it and they will get shown the ad more to keep the number of impressions
consistent. However, there will be cases where an ad gets less impressions
because the majority of people dislike it. We feel that serving these ads as
much as the ads that everyone likes creates an inefficiency in the cost per
click model: if you're a website publisher and there are two ads that pay the
same per click, you're not making as much off the less popular ad. We're
exploring ways to incorporate ad ratings into the cost structure in a way that
gives advertisers incentive to make well-liked ads.

Also: guaranteeing a minimum viewership/maximum price for cost estimation is
definitely something we're aware of, and we have some ideas on how to achieve
that. We'll reveal them when we're done ; ).

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rokhayakebe
One thing I will give the YC guys though is that you can make some hell of
user friendly website. I know what the site does within 5 seconds. Anyone has
a few spare hours to spend on my website?

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staunch
It's an exciting idea because it has that magic "Why didn't anyone do this
before" feel to it. That's always a good sign. Good luck. I haven't had any
coffee yet but I totally missed the voting thumbs on the left, and I was
looking for them. Not sure if that's good or bad though.

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Alex3917
There was a lot of hype when Seth Godin implemented this idea on Squidoo back
in December. I haven't heard much about it since. That's not to say it's a bad
idea, but rather that it's not some miracle technology with guaranteed easy
money.

I thought it had a lot of potential at the time and I still think it has a lot
of potential now. The only problem is that until there is a large body of ads
you get very scatterbrained results.

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rms
There's an automatic large body of ads because their default ad is the Amazon
affiliate program. While there's not a lot of money to be made as an Amazon
affiliate, there's useful information to be gained about a user's taste in
media.

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ivankirigin
I hate ads. Everyone hates ads. Why would we take what is largely an automated
process (extracting information from a site to guide ads), and make humans do
it?

With the idea to "make something people want", isn't it a bad idea to make
something a minority want and the vast majority will fight against? Especially
considering the majority's clicks are all that matter.

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daniel-cussen
When they say they will make something people want, they mean the advertisers.
Besides, this is the Internet. Ads are here to stay, so why not make them suck
less than Google's Adsense?

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ivankirigin
My point is that advertisers will like this, content creators might like this
if they get more money, but the USERS of the site will not like it. I'm not
saying this is worse than other image ads, though it is presumptuous to try to
waste my time in the process of trying to sell me something.

"Ads are here to stay"

This isn't true. Ads needn't dominate the way people make money on the web.

They certainly suck more than text ads.

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Tichy
Hm, interesting, but slightly weird concept. If the users are willing to vote
actively for their favorite ads, why not let them do it on your homepage to
begin with?

On the other hand, why voting, isn't click/no click sufficient information to
judge the effectiveness of ads (seems to work for Google Adwords)?

~~~
vegashacker
That's a really good point about the click/no-click. That said, I could see
myself down-voting ads for which there's no chance I'd ever click, leaving ads
I might be interested in at some point, but didn't actually want to click at
that moment.

Also, there's the type of ad where you think you might be interested in it, so
you click it to see what it's about, only to find that the product or whatever
actually sucks. That's where the down-vote would help.

I don't know if this idea will work, though. Assuming it's used by web
surfers, then I think advertisers will want it. But that's a big assumption.
What's the incentive for web surfers to use it? Looking at ads, even "high-
quality" ones, isn't really a priority of mine. And there are other tools like
StumbleUpon or del.icio.us that suggest content to me, but don't really have
the commercial agenda that an ad does.

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rokhayakebe
I wonder when people are going to get it. We have been talking about "IN-
vertising" for ever but NO, NO, NO. We still want to guess what the user
wants. No software can tell what a user wants better than the user
him/herself. I believe we should spend more time and resources providing users
with services that let the user initially decide the ads they want. For me
send anything that rhymes with coffee, mobility, startups and thick women.
Block the other ads. If I feel like buying a car in the next few weeks, then
let me pull the firefox or IE plugin and tell it to serve me a few VW Golf ads
and listings. Would it be hard to build such a plugin?

~~~
randallsquared
If you already know you want a VW Golf, the ad isn't very useful for the
advertiser.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Yes it is. If there are 4 cars dealers in my state who have what I am looking
for, they can all serve ads to me, then I compare and buy the best car with
the best payment option.

~~~
vegashacker
I may be a minority, but that's not how I buy stuff if I know what I want to
buy. If I know what I want to buy, then I research the item using Google.

I don't click on ads often, but when I do, it's usually because something
caught my attention that I wasn't directly searching for.

The one exception is that I occasionally try to "trigger" ads that give me a
discount once I know exactly what I want.

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nickb
<http://www.kuro5hin.org/> had ads that you can comment on etc. but it never
worked out. These new ads are a step forward with the targeting system.

Still, I'd like to know how many people actually care about seeing ads.

~~~
staunch
Reddit too, also failed there as far as I can tell: <http://ads.reddit.com/>

This doesn't mean it wouldn't work across a large set of sites though.
Aggregating responses and correlating them should produce really effective
targeting.

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ntoshev
This is not such a great idea, but it probably can be tweaked.

First, it needs _some_ automated targeting. Does anyone know how AdSense
targets ads? I bet the ad ends up on the pages that would be returned from a
Google query containing the keywords. The better pagerank, the more expensive
the ad. I do not have in mind a good algorithm for adpinion, but they should
figure something out - Google's targeting is really good..

Second, upclicking doesn't matter and the button is not even needed. The only
way the user indicates he likes the ad should be to click through.

Third, do not just count votes. Implement the best open recommendation
algorithm from Netflix prize contest instead.

Downclicking that hides the ad is good and useful.

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eposts
Its plastered all over paulgraham.com, not just the essays. I personally like
the ad free version of paulgraham.com :). I wonder if adpinion is another YC
startup.

~~~
pg
Yep. Why else would I do it?

~~~
falsestprophet
To make tens upon tens of dollars!

~~~
Alex3917
It's all about the Hamiltons.

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zach
I got a chuckle that you had to link to Adpinion, because practically every
page on paulgraham.com has already been submitted.

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ph0rque
So what kind of information can the adpinion guys extract if someone downvotes
every single ad?

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lukexi
Hi ph0rque, the theory is that even the most ardent of ad-downvoters would
eventually like an ad enough to not down it (or, that they would get bored of
compulsive negativity, and start being more selective). That one ad would be
an extremely valuable piece of information. -Luke

~~~
ivankirigin
Sorry, but that doesn't make sense. The haters won't down-vote. They just
won't click at all.

~~~
vegashacker
That's still a piece of information though, especially if the same user has
actively down-voted other items.

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ivankirigin
There is no useful information gained if people never touch the system.
Clearly non-downvoting means something for people who periodically downvote.
But the way I plan to use the service is ... not at all.

~~~
vegashacker
I see, I miss-read what you wrote. I had thought we were still talking about
"ardent down-voters" Yes, in order for them to glean any information from a
particular user there will have to be some clicks. And indeed, the most common
way that a user uses this system might very well be "not at all".

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brlewis
I would suggest instead of "Sorry" say, "OK, Bye." I think the latter would be
more satisfying.

I adblock only distracting animated ads. Will they notice a pattern if I
downvote according to ad style, or is it only based on ad topic?

~~~
Goladus
I like "Sorry" actually. It may help raise awareness of how annoying and
intrusive bad ads are. "Ok, bye" would be appropriate if it was a friend of
yours showing you the ad rather than a faceless corporation.

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daniel-cussen
I hate ads as much as the next guy. But somehow, I still voted up an ad at the
end of a pg essay. It worked on me.

The UI is good, the idea is really elegant, and it is well executed.

~~~
vegashacker
I did the same thing, but I'll bet you did it for the same reason as me -- you
wanted to try it out because it was a YC company and you were curious.

Now I wasn't "lying" when I up-voted the ad -- it did seem generally
interesting (some Ruby site that provided tutorial screencasts), but I'm not
sure I would have voted if it wasn't linked off news.yc.

~~~
daniel-cussen
You're right. I was well-disposed because I figured it was a YC startup.

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omarish
So how do you get a sample set that's not biased? What kind of benefit is
there to the user in saying that the ad worked the way it should?

~~~
brlewis
The user who doesn't like an ad benefits from thumbs down because the ad
disappears and he's less likely to see similar ads in the future.

The user who likes an ad benefits from thumbs up because he's more likely to
see similar ads in the future.

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pageman
Hi Paul, another Paul here. We're interested to know if we can integrate
Adpinion with AsiaPay.Com maybe you can email me at paulpajo [at] gmail

