<story><title>VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/7jMWV7oCQpn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thirdsun</author><text>Thanks for your insight.&lt;p&gt;Maybe I&amp;#x27;m naive but how are these ads of any value to the advertiser? - nobody wants them, everybody ignores them. How can ads that surely almost exclusively receive accidental clicks be so worthwhile for publishers like you?</text></item><item><author>cantlin</author><text>At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn&amp;#x27;t rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important.&lt;p&gt;We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it.&lt;p&gt;We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad provider. &amp;quot;It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Oops. We&amp;#x27;d naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went and did the work[0], hating every minute of it.&lt;p&gt;The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes made by an industry.&lt;p&gt;I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more.&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;guardian&amp;#x2F;video-js-vpaid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;guardian&amp;#x2F;video-js-vpaid&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dave_sullivan</author><text>Advertising is a weird business.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s different types of media: print, television, digital (banner ads). Print is dead (has been the increasingly accurate argument for 10 years now), television is expensive and untrackable, and digital is here to save the ad industry because that&amp;#x27;s where all your customers are and it&amp;#x27;s very trackable.&lt;p&gt;The value to the advertiser is either direct-action (&amp;quot;click here and buuuuuy!&amp;quot;) or branding (&amp;quot;we exist, see!&amp;quot;) Companies like Verizon, Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, unilever, etc. spend billions on branding.&lt;p&gt;How does that money get allocated? Well, you&amp;#x27;ve got a brand manager for, say, Acme Inc. Their job is &amp;quot;Get more people to buy&amp;quot; and they split their resources between creative--often working with big agencies (think Madmen, see AdAge)--and media buying. There&amp;#x27;s often pressure to spend less on creative and more on ad buys. And when ad buys don&amp;#x27;t perform, they say &amp;quot;We should have spent more on creative&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Media buying is basically buying banner ads (or tv or whatever). They&amp;#x27;re typically sold at a CPM (Cost Per thousand iMpressions), less often Cost Per Click.&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question: major brands have billions for branding and it&amp;#x27;s a bunch of people&amp;#x27;s jobs to spend that money and convince the people they work for that it&amp;#x27;s money well spent. And if it&amp;#x27;s not money well spent, they&amp;#x27;ll find someone who will tell them it is.</text></comment>
<story><title>VPAID ads destroy performance and are still served by major ad networks</title><url>https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/7jMWV7oCQpn</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thirdsun</author><text>Thanks for your insight.&lt;p&gt;Maybe I&amp;#x27;m naive but how are these ads of any value to the advertiser? - nobody wants them, everybody ignores them. How can ads that surely almost exclusively receive accidental clicks be so worthwhile for publishers like you?</text></item><item><author>cantlin</author><text>At the Guardian we needed our own video player, because we couldn&amp;#x27;t rely on a third party platform not to take down something that we published. Editorial independence was important.&lt;p&gt;We implemented our player on top of video.js, and most of the developers who were there at the time still have nightmares about it.&lt;p&gt;We finally got the thing working, looking good, embeddable, reasonably cross-browser. We shipped it. A few days later, we get a curious email from some ad provider. &amp;quot;It looks like your VPAID ads have stopped running!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Oops. We&amp;#x27;d naively believed we could live without Flash (I take full responsibility for this stupidity). The sales folks pointed to a big gap between our old projected revenue and our new projected revenue. So we went and did the work[0], hating every minute of it.&lt;p&gt;The underinvestment in ad-tech by publishers and the cancerous ecosystem of vendors that have grown up around it is one of biggest collective mistakes made by an industry.&lt;p&gt;I am optimistic that this problem can be solved, and we are actively looking at this at my current employer. We sell direct, usually without a ton of intermediaries. Talk to me if you want to know more.&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, if you want to know if a publisher is going to survive the next five years, a decent proxy is the number of intermediaries involved in their ad supply chain.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;guardian&amp;#x2F;video-js-vpaid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;guardian&amp;#x2F;video-js-vpaid&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>untog</author><text>&amp;gt; nobody wants them, everybody ignores them&lt;p&gt;While the former is true, the latter is not. And clicks aren&amp;#x27;t the only measure, especially where video is concerned. There&amp;#x27;s a lot of voodoo in advertising, but advertisers do look at their statistics, and see an uptick in sales&amp;#x2F;brand awareness&amp;#x2F;etc when they run video ads like that.</text></comment>