That's just not how digital ad campaigns are run. Advertisers, agencies, media buyers and the rest of the supply chain don't negotiate with individual sites like that, not at any scale that can sustain a site like SO.
No. They already do this. This is how ads have been run on SO forever. The new ad network ads that they've started with are an aberration from SO's own established practice.
No they don't. They use their own adserver (bought from adzerk) to physically serve the ads, but they have always come through RTB connections to ad exchanges.
There are private marketplaces and "automated guaranteed" deals to isolate their inventory in its representation and pricing from the rest of the market but the actual campaigns they get exposure to, and the creatives delivered, aren't special to them.
They run house-ads for their own jobs board and products, and they will have private marketplaces inside the exchanges, but those campaigns and creatives will still go through the standard adtech supply chain with all the JS-based layers added on.
They do sell job postings and have sponsored tags so it's not all network ad revenue, but that's a minority of the income. Since they released their Q/A SaaS product now, maybe they’ll shift to selling that as the primary revenue stream.
I thought Penny Arcade does bespoke ads. Rock Paper Shotgun used to do bespoke ads. I always found them million times more effective, and more trust-inspiring of both ad AND site, to me.
Is SO smaller business? Possible... just surprised.
Those sites are far smaller than Stackoverflow. Bespoke campaigns don't always pay more, and usually mean less total revenue for the site if that's all they run.
Tell that to John Gruber over at DaringFireball - He makes $6500 a week just from posting one ad in the RSS feed. If he can gross over $300K a year on a niche Apple blog without a sales team, can you imagine what a sales team could do at SO?
He also sells three ad spots on his mostly weekly podcast for $6000 each. He’s a one man business grossing over 1 million a year without a sales team.
I don't need to imagine, I've been in adtech for 12 years and built companies and sales teams. DaringFireball is 1 example of an extremely tiny minority that can earn that today after building up an audience and reputation for decades.
It doesn't just scale up linearly and getting to $10M is magnitudes more work, especially if they're going to place their own requirements on campaigns and creatives. Even buzzfeed went back to programmatic ads with layoffs because their custom articles didn't sustain the business.
> He’s a one man business grossing over 1 million a year without a sales team
1) He has a sales person that sells ads on his podcast: http://neat.fm
2) Extrapolating from published rates is not very reliable. Nobody except John Gruber and his accountant knows how many sponsors really pay the sticker price.
It’s the whole “1000 True Fans” method of making money. If your company can stay small, it doesn’t take as much to have a sustainable “lifestyle business”.
> Shouldn't smaller sites find it *harder to gain attention of publishers and obtain bespoke ads?
I suspect there's a demand problem: while a bigger site might be better at gaining the attention of those buying non-network ads, there may not be a sufficient volume that is even considering buying ads in that market to support a larger site, and changing that takes either more or bigger sites than even SO.
Native is a format, RTB is ad transactions and delivery. They're not mutually exclusive. If you mean an entirely custom format then that reach is offset by the higher production and impression costs, which results in less overall demand.
Liquidity becomes an issue, which is why Reddit is a good example. They also use adzerk and built their own custom self-serve ad network but they make very little money compared to similar traffic using standard programmatic demand.
That would be the reddit example, just low overall demand for something like that. They could try it, but probably already did the analysis to see its not worth it.
I don't think demand would stay low if other sites started doing the same thing.
Companies basically have to advertise, and they'll buy time with whatever outlet serves the eyes they want to reach. Ford Motors isn't gonna let MyPillow.com take over ESPN.com on Super Bowl day just because they don't like the advertising provider, method, or architecture.
You're right, but it's impossible to overstate how uncooperative publishers are. They refuse to work with each other and every major publisher-run ad exchange has failed. Maybe privacy and data regulations will finally push them to change.
> That's just not how digital ad campaigns are run
I appreciate you trying to fight the argument that's being made, and you have a background for a valid opinion people are dismissing.
That being said, I'm on the buying end and work a lot of different channels, and would argue that there are definitely direct buy models that SO could utilise.
Lots of smaller sites have started offering direct buy inventory in larger quantities recently, and pretty much every media package I've bought this year has had some internally served display with it. I'd expect this to work its way upwards, and would fully expect something self serve to come soon for internal buys.
Also, SO seems prime for a self-serve product akin to AdWords, Reddit, or even Facebook. We already buy on those channels (even though through an agency, the agency is just buying self-serve on their end - and they put their insurance, tracking and ASBOF & TI on the cost).
That's be a really cool project actually, self-serve ad platform for a forum/knowledge base.
I'm curious how you're buying these packages? Is this traded directly with the site instead of a DSP? Also it seems like you're in the UK, is that right? Aren't the privacy laws having a major effect on the programmatic market there?
I covered it in other comments but yes, SO could start their own self-serve ads like Reddit (since they both use adzerk). The problem with that ends up being lower quality ads and the inevitable support costs, and the fact that they don't have unique formats other than banners. Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, and others have custom formats but it's definitely something they can pursue.
In your opinion, what are the main factors or thresholds (impression volume, RPM, etc) where a self-serve solution starts to make sense for a publisher? Ie. what framework would you use to determine viability?
Separately, in your opinion, what sort of stack should a publisher consider if they want to be privacy-friendly? Obviously if certain values are left out of the bid request, fill RPMs will suffer, but that may be acceptable for some publishers as the cost of striking a better balance between privacy and ad revenue.
I realize there's a lot to unpack, but feel free to get technical with me, I'm on both the buy and sell side.
It comes down to inventory (volume and quality) and supply path (how easy is it to buy). There's a trade off there as buyers will put in more work if it's highend buys (like NYT homepage takeovers) but a normal site probably need around 10M clean (no bots, not paid traffic) impressions per/month to make it worthwhile at this point, so that there's enough fill to offset separate discussions for your supply.
If you have that volume, then the first step is to create private marketplace deals (with deal ids) and negotiate with all the big agencies and trading desks. It's mostly about getting the right intros and meetings but is good outcomes for both sides and is easy to maintain.
Privacy-friendly is a whole different game though and the industry is not ready. Everyone is still focused on cookies even though we're rapidly getting to 50% of impressions not having them at all (or having no persistent ones). One option is running your own adserver (several that you can buy on the market) to control the endpoints (reduce adblocking and cookie loss) but that doesn't really affect the bid requests and creatives as you say. It's really just fixing the final layer and it's also a lot of work for most pub dev teams. Hard for anyone but big sites that can dedicate enough resources to a self-serve system and back it up with a sales team.
The long-term solution is working with and upgrading RTB to handle privacy compliance. This is a new project that my team has started called Privolta [1] which is a privacy-first ad server and SSP that removes all PII and identifying marks in a bid request while still allowing buyers to maintain frequency caps and aggregated targeting. The biggest challenges are in working with DSPs to clear a supply path and also monitoring and modifying creatives safely so no tracking data is collected while the ad is rendered. Happy to discuss more if you're interested, let me know.
> Is this traded directly with the site instead of a DSP?
Yep, direct buy with the site, I'm in a niche with a lot of sector specific media - some mix it with other inventory (so I guess serving it as bespoke through a standard DSP), and some only have direct bought. We also buy a lot through standard platforms too for reach and retargeting, but I've noted a marked increase in the last year-18months of sites offering it directly (often at competitive rates).
> Also it seems like you're in the UK, is that right? Aren't the privacy laws having a major effect on the programmatic market there?
Not massively to be fair, the market has just consolidated a bit more - so large scale buys are going more and more through Google (as the industry trusts them to either know their stuff or pay the fines if they get caught). Perhaps the rise of sites offering it is as a result, thinking they can offer a more privacy conscious option, but my assumption is that they're just trying to offer a more niche offering with closer alignment between content and ads (and trying to slowly push CPMs up - which is somewhat fair, my CTRs are higher on direct bought vs prospecting ads).
> SO could start their own self-serve ads
I think that's why other commenters have been getting agro, the fact is they could do it, and they have some very useful 1st party data to make it quite a compelling offering, but they're relying on all our old tools. I'd like to see them get the revenue in and then build it out.
> That's just not how digital ad campaigns are run.
At that point I'd expect sites like Stack Overflow to point out that they have a specific of way of running their sites as well - and that shouldn't include having ads execute arbitary javascript.
While those requirements would certainly exclude a significant number of ad agencies, I can't imagine that there aren't enough advertisers left that would happily play by Stack Overflow's rules to reach a rather large and specific target audience with (likely) disposable income.
Youtubers run ads and sponsorships in their videos all the time (not the automated ads from Adsense). Squarespace, Dollar Shave Club, Ting, PIA; they all directly pay Youtubers to run ads. Youtube even had to block Youtubers from using brand's logos outside their ad network in videos.
There are a million channels for every one that gets any sponsorship, and there's an equivalent ratio for the pricing of these ads. The CPMs on sponsored content are usually lower than network CPMs until you cross over to the very popular channels, but even then it's really just shifting the production costs of a video ad to the youtuber and paying some premium for their reputation.
It's very hard to scale and again there are networks and agencies that aggregate channels for most campaigns and buyers. Anyway, Stackoverflow isn't producing their own content and the pricing mechanics of Youtube/video advertising is very different than display ads so this isn't really comparable.
Stack Overflow has a known demographic and is not some unknown site. Are you really saying that companies like Amazon (AWS),Microsoft, JetBrains, Google (GCP), Slack, etc would ignore a sales pitch from SO?
It doesn't work like that is what I'm saying. You dont just pitch those companies. They have layers of agencies (a master agency of record, creative agencies, media buying agencies) that handle all the advertising duties. These shops create and traffic these ad campaigns in demand-side platforms (DSPs) which connect and bid on inventory in adexchanges and supply-side platforms (SSPs).
Then there's layers of targeting, accountability, measurement, and insurance that gets requested and bought from anti-fraud, brand-safety and verification vendors. That's likely where this fingerprinting came script came from.
Going to individual agencies with your own different supply path is not going to get any attention and nobody is going to change the way they buy millions in advertising just for you. No single publisher has that much power these days, not even Stackoverflow.
of course you pitch this way. you hire an inside sales guy who has personal relationships with c-level execs, and those execs make it happen because they're personally invested.
Make what happen exactly? C-level execs do not run ad campaigns. At most they'll defer to the CMO, who then just tells you to talk to their agency.
There are private marketplaces and other deals you can work out with agencies but this is usually for inventory against existing campaign RFPs, and comes with all of the typical creative requirements. They're not going to run an entirely custom campaign under your own terms and restrictions, not at any sustainable scale.
Most ad money is in walled gardens (Facebook running ads on facebook.com). SMBs and performance marketers buy billions without ever talking to a salesperson.
Advertising at big companies is the only space left for traditional sales teams and it's all outsourced to agencies. Adtech vendors and publishers sell to these agencies, not the client (and if they do, its just redirected) but there aren't any long-term deals because everything is constantly shifting. Agencies have lots of teams, they win and lose accounts, work on multiple campaign initiatives and strategies with constantly changing budgets and requirements, and use dozens of vendors to create and execute campaigns.
This is the opposite of a traditional SaaS contract sold for a term directly to the people that will be using it. There's also a steady trend towards all inventory being traded programmatically which will eliminate most of the sales negotiations. Unique inventory and formats can still stand out but they also cost more in effort and money so there's less overall demand. It's very hard to scale custom sales like that, especially if one of your requirements is to avoid all the javascript verification, brand-safety and measurement.
Most media sales these days is more about biz dev to get the pipes connected to exchanges and represent your inventory in the best way possible while letting the market work.
