How is fraud handled for TV advertising? Or print? This isn’t some weird new problem. The truth is that ad-tech wants to track you to make your profile more valuable, however, a less valuable user doesn’t mean advertising doesn’t work, it just means the bottom-feeding middlemen get a less profound payday.
Why not just flip the model from eyeballs and clicks to actual ad effectiveness? Newspaper car ads have this down to a science. They don’t count “clicks” of their newspaper ad — they see how many customers come in asking about a car in the ad.
If I have an airplane website and someone wants to advertise to people who like airplanes. I can suggest a price of $1000 and if the advertiser wants to spend the money, they do. I might charge $1000 because I have a lot of visitors or just because I want to. That’s the price I set for whatever reason I set it. If an advertiser doesn’t want to spend that, they can choose not to. If they want to measure effectiveness, they can do it by offering viewers of that ad a discount code or something. When the code is used, they know they got that customer from my ad. Once they’ve validated that their ad “works” and the acquisition cost works, then they’ll keep paying my rate — no bot influence at all. No real chance of fraud because there wouldn’t be any money in it. Publishers would actually have an incentive to sell your product because they want to justify their ad rates. No need for tracking either.
Advertising works and it can be both more effective and privacy-respecting. Ad-tech has turned vast swaths of the Internet into a cesspool. It doesn’t have to be like that.
If you are a publisher and have actual content humans care about, ditch the ad networks and start selling your pixels directly to relevant advertisers.
The problem is that the incentives for fraudsters and publishers are aligned under the current model: more clicks equals more money, the actual advertiser who is selling something gets to pay that fraud tax. Perhaps advertisers should start seeking out relevant content and offering to buy space directly, refusing to deal with “networks.” Their acquisition costs would go down, that’s for sure. Harder to scale, but so what, you have a higher yield effort for a lot less money.
if you are a publisher and have actual content humans care about, ditch the ad networks and start selling your pixels directly to relevant advertisers.
Good luck with direct ad sales, unless you are a large company with a large ad sales team and correspondingly large budget.
Why not just flip the model from eyeballs and clicks to actual ad effectiveness? Newspaper car ads have this down to a science. They don’t count “clicks” of their newspaper ad — they see how many customers come in asking about a car in the ad.
If I have an airplane website and someone wants to advertise to people who like airplanes. I can suggest a price of $1000 and if the advertiser wants to spend the money, they do. I might charge $1000 because I have a lot of visitors or just because I want to. That’s the price I set for whatever reason I set it. If an advertiser doesn’t want to spend that, they can choose not to. If they want to measure effectiveness, they can do it by offering viewers of that ad a discount code or something. When the code is used, they know they got that customer from my ad. Once they’ve validated that their ad “works” and the acquisition cost works, then they’ll keep paying my rate — no bot influence at all. No real chance of fraud because there wouldn’t be any money in it. Publishers would actually have an incentive to sell your product because they want to justify their ad rates. No need for tracking either.
Advertising works and it can be both more effective and privacy-respecting. Ad-tech has turned vast swaths of the Internet into a cesspool. It doesn’t have to be like that.
If you are a publisher and have actual content humans care about, ditch the ad networks and start selling your pixels directly to relevant advertisers.
The problem is that the incentives for fraudsters and publishers are aligned under the current model: more clicks equals more money, the actual advertiser who is selling something gets to pay that fraud tax. Perhaps advertisers should start seeking out relevant content and offering to buy space directly, refusing to deal with “networks.” Their acquisition costs would go down, that’s for sure. Harder to scale, but so what, you have a higher yield effort for a lot less money.