<story><title>Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless</title><url>https://youexec.com/dev/2017/1/14/google-facebook-ads-traffic-is-useless</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>victorhooi</author><text>What exactly is &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; amounts of money? If by dumb, you mean enough for authors to get by, then you are probably in the minority.&lt;p&gt;People love talking about how much they hate ads, and how, no, they&amp;#x27;re not cheap, they would totally pay for content.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. And if site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it&amp;#x27;s a race to the bottom.&lt;p&gt;Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far).&lt;p&gt;Many attempts have been made to monetise things (a la micropayments).&lt;p&gt;I believe Google did something before, where you paid cents, or fractions of a cent to authors for article views. This was back in 2012:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;business-20395407&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;business-20395407&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And recently Mozilla&amp;#x27;s Brendan Eich is doing Brave, with bitcoin micropayments. I&amp;#x27;d love to see it gain traction, but I don&amp;#x27;t see it going mainstream.&lt;p&gt;Look, I know some ad networks go too far - but IMHO, Google&amp;#x2F;FB ads are hardly &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; intrusive. (I personally hate pop-up&amp;#x2F;pop-under ads, and auto-playing videos)&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in ads - above opinions are purely my own).</text></item><item><author>dajohnson89</author><text>We, as users, have been oversaturated and desensitized. There is so much crap shoved in our faces, that we&amp;#x27;ve learned over the years to ignore all ads.&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself, I have an almost visceral negative reaction with ads. I would (and do) pay dumb amounts of money for a service if that means I&amp;#x27;m not served ads.</text></item><item><author>abalashov</author><text>I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it&amp;#x27;s money down the drain, and I&amp;#x27;ve never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I&amp;#x27;ve spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about which keywords to target, and mimicked the reputedly successful approaches of my competitors. Nada. Would have been better off shoveling cash into an open pit.&lt;p&gt;The only customers I&amp;#x27;ve gained through web marketing have been organic, coming through bona fide referrals on other sites. The &amp;quot;hit rate&amp;quot; on that has been pretty good, suggesting that the blame can&amp;#x27;t lie entirely with my crappy sites...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bumblebeard</author><text>I guess I&amp;#x27;m cheap then. I have no interest in paying any amount of money to read most of the things I read online. It seems to me that it&amp;#x27;s not so much that people are demanding this content for free as it is that people don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s worth paying for. It&amp;#x27;s not that I particularly wanted to see an article about the usefulness of advertising as it is that it&amp;#x27;s something to read on the bus. I would probably just look out the window instead if the alternative weren&amp;#x27;t free.&lt;p&gt;Most articles&amp;#x2F;videos on sites like HN fall into this category - I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have paid to read this article for example. To me, this comment thread is worth much more than the article itself and I don&amp;#x27;t see anybody here upset that they aren&amp;#x27;t getting paid to comment.&lt;p&gt;I guess that means that I would probably pay a subscription fee to a site like HN but that I wouldn&amp;#x27;t generally pay for the content itself, which does seem a little backwards. Still, that&amp;#x27;s what&amp;#x27;s valuable to me. Does anybody else feel this way or am I weird?</text></comment>
<story><title>Google and Facebook ad traffic is 90% useless</title><url>https://youexec.com/dev/2017/1/14/google-facebook-ads-traffic-is-useless</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>victorhooi</author><text>What exactly is &amp;quot;dumb&amp;quot; amounts of money? If by dumb, you mean enough for authors to get by, then you are probably in the minority.&lt;p&gt;People love talking about how much they hate ads, and how, no, they&amp;#x27;re not cheap, they would totally pay for content.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free. And if site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it&amp;#x27;s a race to the bottom.&lt;p&gt;Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far).&lt;p&gt;Many attempts have been made to monetise things (a la micropayments).&lt;p&gt;I believe Google did something before, where you paid cents, or fractions of a cent to authors for article views. This was back in 2012:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;business-20395407&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;business-20395407&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And recently Mozilla&amp;#x27;s Brendan Eich is doing Brave, with bitcoin micropayments. I&amp;#x27;d love to see it gain traction, but I don&amp;#x27;t see it going mainstream.&lt;p&gt;Look, I know some ad networks go too far - but IMHO, Google&amp;#x2F;FB ads are hardly &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; intrusive. (I personally hate pop-up&amp;#x2F;pop-under ads, and auto-playing videos)&lt;p&gt;(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not in ads - above opinions are purely my own).</text></item><item><author>dajohnson89</author><text>We, as users, have been oversaturated and desensitized. There is so much crap shoved in our faces, that we&amp;#x27;ve learned over the years to ignore all ads.&lt;p&gt;Speaking for myself, I have an almost visceral negative reaction with ads. I would (and do) pay dumb amounts of money for a service if that means I&amp;#x27;m not served ads.</text></item><item><author>abalashov</author><text>I really thought I was crazy when I thought that a 99% bounce rate is unreal, even for my highly specialised product sites which cater to a very niche audience. But I ultimately came to a similar conclusion; no matter what ads I come up with, it&amp;#x27;s money down the drain, and I&amp;#x27;ve never had a single conversion that came through the door that way. I&amp;#x27;ve spent untold thousands on paid ads. I learned a great deal about which keywords to target, and mimicked the reputedly successful approaches of my competitors. Nada. Would have been better off shoveling cash into an open pit.&lt;p&gt;The only customers I&amp;#x27;ve gained through web marketing have been organic, coming through bona fide referrals on other sites. The &amp;quot;hit rate&amp;quot; on that has been pretty good, suggesting that the blame can&amp;#x27;t lie entirely with my crappy sites...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Fnoord</author><text>&amp;gt; Let&amp;#x27;s be honest - internet users are cheap. They want stuff for free.&lt;p&gt;There are 3 problems with this statement.&lt;p&gt;1) There is a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of free content, easily found, and content gets more rapidly out of date nowadays. Paid content must deal with this (newsworthy, in depth competition).&lt;p&gt;2) Your view is US centric; the vast majority (read: not all) of internet users from other countries generally have less money to spend.&lt;p&gt;3) The cost of loss of privacy is indirect, therefore hidden, and US companies generally get away with it. This is why data mining is currently profitable.&lt;p&gt;In order to solve #3 shit must first hit the fan, to increase awareness. #1 is solved by collectively putting the high quality content behind paywall. #2 can in theory be solved by globalisation in long-term. Short-term, dynamic price makes sense, but it makes #1 &amp;amp; #3 worse.&lt;p&gt;Let me quote the rest of your statement:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; [...] They want stuff for free. And if site A starts charging, they will jump ship to site B, until eventually it&amp;#x27;s a race to the bottom.&lt;p&gt;Agreed, except for example for (local) newspapers who also provide online access as part of their sub. Global newspapers have more competition. Especially given the widespread English language.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Ads seems to be the only model that works (thus far).&lt;p&gt;For Google, yes. For privacy, no. In apps on an unrooted Android device, yes. On recent iOS and desktops, no (the latter 2 due to ad blockers).&lt;p&gt;Also, streaming media such as Spotify proves a subscription in a new market (not newspapers) can work. Netflix proves it for video.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; And recently Mozilla&amp;#x27;s Brendan Eich is doing Brave, with bitcoin micropayments. I&amp;#x27;d love to see it gain traction, but I don&amp;#x27;t see it going mainstream.&lt;p&gt;Not yet a final, stable non developer version released AFAIK. Also, Eich is no longer part of Mozilla.</text></comment>