
How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs -- Great post by creator of Metafilter - especkman
http://fortuito.us/2007/05/how_ads_really_work_superfans_1
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chmike
Very interesting article. I had the same idea, but instead of completely
eliminate ads for fans, I would sell the bandwidth at a high price or even
with auction.

This ad bandiwdth has a high value for advertisers because of the occasional
ad display, a campaing would have a higher visibility (no ad blindness
effect). The fan's interests are well identified so that the ad can be
focused. It will also make more sense for the fans and eventually be useful to
them.

One can always trade member fee with add display, but one should keep the
auction effect so that advertisers that pay a high fee still get through. The
user could also increase its fee to make the ad barrier higher. This yields a
competition.

I designed this business model for a startup using crowd sourcing, where fans
contributing to the site would get back their fair share of ad revenue. They
could use part of this revenue to increase the ad barrier. The idea was to
create a vertuous circle that motivate users and advertisers to increase
contribution.

I gave up because funding was too short and I was alone without much time to
invest on it. And also because I wasn't sure it would work. So I'm glad to see
the base idea is already practiced.

People should understand that flooding the web with ads is diluting its value.
So one need ways to increase focus in the benefit of users and advertisers.

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ralph
Won't more and more users find plugins like Adblock over time? And if someone
was to set up a trusted list of URLs to block and the plugin updated
occasionally whole swaves of ads would disappear and not be loaded.

Has anyone any stats from their site that show how many people are blocking
ads?

~~~
especkman
At this point, there are over 150M adults online in the US. I doubt a large %
of them will end up installing adblock.

Keep in mind too, blocking ads isn't necessarily a rational decision for a lot
of people in a lot of situations. We can put aside the fact that ads provide
economic incentive for the content people are looking for.

The important thing is that ads are often gateways to the things people are
looking for (with is one of the points of the article). People buy goods and
services. Ads provide a way for people to find sellers of the goods and
services they want.

The advertising driven business model is an extremely old one, and I don't
think it's going anywhere. People have always had the capacity to ignore
advertising, even without technology -- the human brain is very selective
about the information it processes and retains.

Some advertising works subliminally/emotionally (most brand advertising), but
highly targeted ads, particularly context sensitive pay per click ads aren't
generally in that category. They work when people are looking for something,
much like the ads from local car dealers in the local paper, which most people
ignore completely unless they have an inclination or outright need for a new
car.

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steve
A different, but possibly correlated metric that I am considering is to base
ad invasiveness on how _desperate_ to use your service each user is.

~~~
dfens
How would you measure desperation?

