<story><title>A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic</title><url>http://www.gwern.net/Ads</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dangrossman</author><text>It wouldn&amp;#x27;t work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100&amp;#x2F;month per household, and you&amp;#x27;d need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can&amp;#x27;t replace that with some $10&amp;#x2F;month subscription even if everyone paid it.</text></item><item><author>badestrand</author><text>Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.</text></item><item><author>buro9</author><text>What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that:&lt;p&gt;1. Banners hurt unless they are relevant&lt;p&gt;2. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers&lt;p&gt;3. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every metric&lt;p&gt;4. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re-writing existing links rather than inserting awful links on a word match basis)&lt;p&gt;That last one is what I now do. Is it as profitable as running banners everywhere? No. But it is the highest possible engagement with some revenue, and if one focuses energy on reducing costs instead it can work well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Houshalter</author><text>I think your estimate is off by more than an order of magnitude. I follow a number of large youtube channels. Many of them seem to be making more money from patreon than from ads. And patreon isn&amp;#x27;t even a true subscription model, since you can usually see the content even if you don&amp;#x27;t subscribe. And it still beats ads.&lt;p&gt;One of my favorite channels is this super niche thing that only gets about 1000-2000 views per video and makes 2 vids a month. That adds up to maybe $4-8 in ad revenue using some rough estimates of youtube&amp;#x27;s payout rate. On patreon he&amp;#x27;s making over $500 a month. Which is really respectable for such a small audience.&lt;p&gt;Online ads have never generated that much money per user and were only profitable in large quantities. Given how scummy they are and this evidence that they repel users, they should be eliminated.</text></comment>
<story><title>A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic</title><url>http://www.gwern.net/Ads</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dangrossman</author><text>It wouldn&amp;#x27;t work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100&amp;#x2F;month per household, and you&amp;#x27;d need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can&amp;#x27;t replace that with some $10&amp;#x2F;month subscription even if everyone paid it.</text></item><item><author>badestrand</author><text>Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.</text></item><item><author>buro9</author><text>What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that:&lt;p&gt;1. Banners hurt unless they are relevant&lt;p&gt;2. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers&lt;p&gt;3. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every metric&lt;p&gt;4. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re-writing existing links rather than inserting awful links on a word match basis)&lt;p&gt;That last one is what I now do. Is it as profitable as running banners everywhere? No. But it is the highest possible engagement with some revenue, and if one focuses energy on reducing costs instead it can work well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>viraptor</author><text>Something&amp;#x27;s not right with that equation. You&amp;#x27;re implying that on average, each household is spending over $1000 per month on things they get via the online advertising that they would otherwise not get at all.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s just not realistic. One-off purchases, maybe. Sustained 1k&amp;#x2F;hh&amp;#x2F;mth avg - I&amp;#x27;d love to see a proof of that.</text></comment>