
The Great Unwatched - kjhughes
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/business/the-great-unwatched.html
======
patmcguire
"The crux of the problem is that the number of video ads that agencies and
brands want to run far exceeds the amount of quality inventory — that is,
well-placed video players on prestigious sites, like, say,
Nationalgeographic.com. When the premium space fills up, media buyers start
looking for video players in less coveted online real estate."

Why doesn't the video market clear? Do clients just refuse to pay enough for
the good space? Don't tell me they know how much that ad space is worth to
them in revenue.

I worked at an adtech startup for two years --- we only barely touched on
video, but the dynamics are still there. Buyers plan on the scale of D-Day but
there's really no place to do that --- there's no halftime superbowl ad on the
internet, just a billion little things that have slightly different
definitions of every single thing involved. What's an inch when screens are
different sizes and the site has responsive design? What if you've got
something built around 4:3 or 16:9 and their site is the opposite? What counts
as adult, exactly? Bet it isn't the same in Northbrook IL as it in Palo Alto).

It's a big mess, and the things that put buyers' minds at ease aren't the same
that make them money.

~~~
notatoad
>The crux of the problem is that the number of video ads that agencies and
brands want to run far exceeds the amount of quality inventory — that is,
well-placed video players on prestigious sites, like, say,
Nationalgeographic.com. When the premium space fills up, media buyers start
looking for video players in less coveted online real estate.

from my uninformed position as a viewer of advertising, it seems like the
opposite of this is true. On any site i would consider premium (e.g. hulu,
youtube, theonion, and yes, nationalgeographic) my biggest pet peeve with
advertising is that they have more ad blocks to fill than they do
advertisements, and they have to keep re-using the same ads over and over
again. surely the advertiser doesn't want to pay for me to see the same
15-second video ad a half-dozen times in a row on a single visit, do they?

~~~
arghbleargh
I wouldn't be so sure that this isn't exactly what they want. Consciously you
get annoyed, but it's those same ads that pop into your head from your
subconscious every once in a while.

~~~
BrandonMarc
Exactly. It's repetition. Maybe you don't click, but you do receive the same
message 15 times. That has consequences ... Maybe not with you in particular,
but averaged out across the audience, yes.

~~~
wiredfool
And that message is: Skip ad in 5 4 3 2 1 click.

~~~
Joeboy
For me, that message is "Digital Ocean is the most irritating company in the
world and I'm never going to give them a cent if I can help it".

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theorique
It's an interesting business, where there is little or no demand for the
"product" from the person who ultimately consumes it. So you have to figure
out ways to trick and/or force the end-consumer to actually consume the
product that you have invested so much effort in producing.

~~~
my_username_is_
While I agree that most of the ads you see online today are not desired, I
would argue that it does not have to be this way. When advertising is done
right, it can open consumers up to products that they wouldn't know exist
without ads. It actually creates value for both the buyer and the seller. A
music news site [0] I tend to visit used to be a shining example of this--ads
promoting new records by bands featured on the site could be seen in their
banners and fit seemlessly with the rest of the page, now they've been
replaced by McDonald's and Dr Pepper across large portions of the site. I've
found out about new albums that I may not have otherwise listened to when ads
were relevant; now that the site's admin realizes that fast food pays more
than indie record labels I'll leave AdBlock enabled.

[0] [http://www.absolutepunk.net](http://www.absolutepunk.net)

~~~
theorique
Agreed, I like watching coming attractions trailers before a movie, or having
suggestions turn up in Spotify.

However, in the latter case, I've already purchased the product, so the
"advertising" is actually an in-product enhancement pointing me at getting
more value out of what I've already paid for. I wonder if I would be so
interested in the cross-promotions if I had to pay for new tracks or albums
every time.

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nl
Remember when people said Google paid too much for Youtube?

Pretty soon it will look like the bargain of the century.

~~~
wutbrodo
It pretty much has already, for a couple of years (particularly in the context
of recent comparably sized purchases like whatsapp)

Edit: I was thinking of instagram, whatsapp was about 15x as expensive as
YouTube.

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coldcode
I despise sites that not only auto-run ads but have multiple ones on the same
page that auto-run together. Of course they probably have no idea since the
ads come from somewhere else from somewhere else from somewhere else.

~~~
rwmj
I've never seen them. In fact the biggest surprise of this article is that
video adverts exist. Using NoScript + youtube-dl, and not having Flash or an
H.264 codec installed, is working well for me.

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malchow
The NYT's piece on unwatched ads contains not fewer than four below-the-fold
<div>s containing display ads from which the paper will likely receive no
revenue.

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hagbardgroup
Why is this agency buying through a network instead of doing it themselves?
They could just do managed placements rather than just tossing it to a network
who does the same thing with less of a direct incentive to serve the client.
The networks lack skin in the game and have an incentive to play the hear no
evil speak no evil see no evil charade.

This is part of the reason why a lot of online media is such trash. Ad budgets
are getting siphoned off by fraud at scale. If the internet's entire purpose
is to connect people with the information that they need as quickly as
possible, then this purpose is being circumvented. Instead they are getting
junk masquerading as information.

The Daily Caller quote is also a canard. They get paid junk rates because they
are offering junk space and have junk site performance and a broken mobile
website. Media companies would treat it as serious if their papers printed
incorrectly half the time or the signal turned to static or had odd color hue
on TV. On the web shoddy workmanship is considered acceptable.

The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more
direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the
inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires
no salespeople.

~~~
morgante
> The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more
> direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the
> inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires
> no salespeople.

It's very hard to sell directly. You have to have significant scale for
advertisers to even be interested in talking to you, and even if you reach
that scale it requires a whole sales staff and tech support which, frankly,
most (digital) publishers just don't have.

~~~
hagbardgroup
Hard? Sure. Scale? Not as much as you think. Local newspapers all over the
country somehow manage to hit $10 cpm for direct sales. I don't dispute that
having a sales team isn't hard or potentially expensive. One of the reason why
digital is such a laggard in a lot of markets is because of the fraud sapping
budgets.

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doxology
I'm seeing a lot of NY Times articles on HN lately, and it's pretty lame stuff
too. Is it my imagination or is HN and NYT in cahoots?

