During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all. You can verify this by counting the number of times you've bought anything by clicking on an ad you saw on a website. Most people I've asked say 0, 1, or 2 items, with a heavy skew towards zero.
For publications in markets with a large number of vendors, the pool of vendors who still see advantage in web ads (such as ads that don't expect purchases, say, as for an upcoming movie) will sustain them. But the software development tools market is small with fewer than 100 vendors, many of which don't advertise at all.
So, essentially, there just was not enough advertising to keep us going.
Andrew, in fairness this is incorrect. Web advertising on content is no more, nor any less, effective than web advertising in a printed magazine. Rather than ask the question "How many of you have clicked on something and bought it." a more relevant question is "How many of you have bought something, or from someone, you have seen as an advertisement on a web page?" Digikey ads showed up on Dr. Dobbs and I've bought a ton of stuff from them. Sometimes reading an article there, will show an ad, and it will remind me of something I was supposed to get. Then I will go over there and buy it. Almost exactly as I did with the magazine version.
That said, click fraud has really burned a lot of advertisers. That is why advertising on content needs to shift to a performance based model, ads that let you know that someone went to a site after they saw the ad on your page, and bought it. That should net you a few $. As it stands, advertisers bid for 10,000 clicks at a nickel ($500 ad spend) and compare that to what they sell, and they come up poorly. If they set aside $500 to reward the first 100 people who clicked through and bought something you would find things to be very very different. Click fraud doesn't work if the value isn't in the click. But this migration is currently not happening as quickly as we would like.
> Web advertising on content is no more, nor any less, effective than web advertising in a printed magazine.
1) Things like AdSense? You're right. The real money is in sponsored content. Just ask BuzzFeed, Forbes, Huff, etc. There's a saying from advertisers when you confront them about traditional print/broadcast advertising success "when sales go up, it just works, you don't question it".
> That is why advertising on content needs to shift to a performance based model
2) Not all advertising is about direct click through to purchasing. Coca-cola, Pepsi and every car manufacturer in the world spend billions a year on advertising simply for brand recognition alone. No one is buying a coke because they saw an ad on Facebook, but they sure as hell associate drinking a coke with happiness because that brand association is pretty ubiquitous nowadays.
I think the OP is insuitating that they should have never been a $3mil business in the first place, which is consistent with your story about your purchase behavior. How many ChuckMcM's are there gonna be have to be that purchase products on Digikey in order to provide $3mil worth of business?
> How many ChuckMcM's are there gonna be have to be
> that purchase products on Digikey in order to provide
> $3mil worth of business?
In this case we've got the numbers from the article, 10.3 million page views means they need a nearly $300 RPM in order to make $3M a year. So yeah, even Google doesn't make $300 RPMs. I wonder if that is the correct number. When I first read it I read 10M page views a DAY not a YEAR. At 10M page views a day they need an RPM of about $0.82 to make $3M/year.
Where does that leave us? Well wondering things. Alexa says they see about "40k visits/day" so 1.2M a month, (that would be closer to 14M/year). 40K visits a day though and clearing $83K/month (1M annual run rate) is like close to $69 RPM. That is pretty good for a content web site.
It means that if they can keep half the visitors going to a paid model, they need to charge 2 USD a year to make 3M. Not counting what they save on not having to run or sell ads. Who here wouldn't pay quite a lot more than that not jus for Dr. Dobbs - but a much more independent (or obly beholden to its readership) Dr. Dobbs?
There's two types of advertising (probably really more):
1) We don't care where you buy the thing we make, just buy it. (Mazda)
2) You want that thing in #1, come buy that thing from me! (Mazda dealership)
I don't think there's ever been a question of the efficacy of #1, but #2 is probably nearly useless online. Anecdotally, an advertisement might remind me I want something, but it isn't going to change my habits in how/where I buy it. Bob's House of Laptop Batteries could offer me a price that's $2 less than Amazon, but if I see Bob offering the exact battery I need at exactly the moment I need it, there's still a pretty good chance I'll buy it from Amazon because of 1) ease, 2) trust, 3) Prime, etc.
> That said, click fraud has really burned a lot of advertisers.
THIS
> That is why advertising on content needs to shift to a performance based model,
As someone in the ad biz,it's something hard to do.You still need ways to track(I understand people don't like it but...) accurately where the traffic comes from.We really need innovative tools in that domain!
Finally,I think the biggest disappointment in web marketing comes from the (un)ability of social medias to really influence sells.FB and co ad services are way worse than classic web advertising.It's borderline scammy.
analyze what happens. You can compare normal behavior - time on page, number of pages viewed etc occurring from normal organic traffic against traffic generated by the ad campaign. Did one site or group of sites send 90% of your clicks, but almost zero real traffic?
Another thing I've seen happen through Adwords was a large percentage of traffic coming through with default language set to Arabic and spending 0 time on site. (on a site intended for English speakers)
Indeed, magazine readers greatly prefer print ads as their most favorite way to be marketed to (61%, Nov 2014). More than twice the percentage as the #2 way which is trade shows, and way more than annoying banner ads (13%).
And why not> Print ads gently invite you to investigate a product on your own terms. Didn't you all look at the ads in Dobbs and every other special interest magazine? It's universal, still is today.
But since online advertising became more measurable than print, print slowly disappeared. In a nutshell.
Ted Bahr
Founder
SD Times
Last Man Standing (almost)
> That is why advertising on content needs to shift to a performance based model, ads that let you know that someone went to a site after they saw the ad on your page, and bought it.
Is't that what affiliate programmes are?
I must've gone about using them in the wrong way, but I didn't make any more money from then than I did from displaying Adwords.
The problem with performance-based model is that is it simply a slower race to the bottom (of quality). Publishers will continue to find ways to trick people into responding and advertisers now consider a lead to be a lead to be a lead. Lowest common denominator wins. Quality loses.
Example: HuffPost. You consider any of that eye-ball grabbing stuff to be quality? (not making a political statement)
I agree with this point. The purpose of an ad need not always be to make a immediate action (like a purchase or signup), but also about creating awareness and reminding people about a brand and its products. This is what most ads in printed form do anyway. RIP DDJ.
> During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all.
I think that's the wrong conclusion to draw.
Advertising on web sites works very, very well and thousands of companies depend on it on a daily basis.
What doesn't work so well is advertising on a web site that's just an online version of a magazine. The problem has a lot more to do with the magazine part than the web site aspect.
I've been reading DrDobbs for a couple of decades and I'm a fan, but the simple truth is that it's become less relevant these past years. First switching to a download only model and then progressively nagging me pretty aggressively to download my own issue (which I stopped doing because the summaries I saw in the email were of little interest to me).
Andrew, reading your editorials has always been a pleasure and you should be proud of what you accomplished.
There is a bit of a feeling that advertising on web sites, much like SEO, is a bit of snake oil business....I agree with the op's statement-- when have you bought anything from a web advertisement anywhere? Maybe you have signed up for a service from one? But bought something? Even something very targeted.... although it does seem that "paid placement" in search -- (google search advertising) does provide some sales... Dvorak has been calling this out for some time.... advertisers seem to be catching up.
I think the irony is that the ability to see a path from view->CTR->action has severely devalued online advertising even though the theory behind it is no different from other, less introspectable forms of advertising.
In other forms of advertising, the advertisor is forced to confront the fact that the connection between advertising and purchasing is not a direct process because they can't see it anyways. They can see that they advertise and somewhere down the line they can observe a general rise in sales or brand knowledge, but they can almost never tie that to even a campaign, let alone a particular impression.
So you have this market for advertising where the advertisers can point to abysmal CTRs and say "See? I shouldn't be paying this much for such terrible action!" while still reaping the benefits of less tangible brand recognition down the road. And thus is born a race to the bottom.
Something that shouldn't be ignored is how many publishers have burned themselves by taking advantage of the technical aspects of online publishing to sell dozens of ads where print media would have sold one. It's enough to compare a magazine article to its online edition. The magazine edition might have four ads if the article spans three pages. Online, the article will span 10 with half a dozen ads on each page. These animated, aggressive ads will vie for the readers eye to the point that they will start using ad blocking software just to be able to actually read the article.
Yes, but those publishers are getting dimes, nay, pennies, compared to the print ad revenue (should say "were" in terms of print).
Publishers did not burn themselves. They were desperate for survival. If they only ran, say 3 banners through an online article they would have simply been out of business. There was nowhere else to turn for many of them as the advertising disappeared. Evolution.
You could also make the argument that publishers are getting pennies for those ads because they're running thirty of them on a page. I've done tons of ad work online, many specs have limits on how taxing the ads can be for the end user's computer not because they don't want to degrade the experience, but so they can run 10 ads on a page at once.
That is silly, so I see why /r/technology liked it.
Of course lots of ads are never seen. Lots of newspaper ads and magazine ads -- if you were to count each individual printing of the ad as its own entity -- are never seen by a human being before the thing ends up in the recycling bin.
This is completely separate from the old saying in marketing, "half my advertising budget is completely wasted, but I don't know which half." That's saying that half of all ad buys are completely worthless.
The only thing Google did wrong was to actually measure if their ads were viewable (for more than a second, mind you).
It's obviously difficult to generalize about ads and I don't think ads were the way to promote Dr. Dobbs.
My personal experience with Google AdWords (take it as an anecdote) is depressing. 10 years ago I had a real and measurable ROI using it. Fastforward a few years and I didn't receive a single customer from them until one day I turned off all my campaigns. In parallel I received many customers from our blog articles, links, etc.
There is another force against ads: AdBlock. The use of adblockers is growing, more in our field.
I don't quite follow the difference between an "online magazine" and any other content site.
But I think I see where you're going. There are a lot of ways to reach developers with ads online. And, frankly, developers are not a very good demographic for advertisers. As a group, they don't spend all that much money. (Compare to e.g. CIOs who may be in charge of million dollar IT budgets.)
At the same time, I don't buy a coke by clicking on the ad' when it airs on TV... The impact of commercial is beyond the simple immediate relation "click & buy".
Yes, but with so many alternative online advertising vehicles that can be measured more precisely, or that can be attributed to purchase in a shorter and more direct cycle, website display advertising gets deprioritized in media plans.
There's a very real value to awareness campaigns, but awareness campaigns are out of fashion at the moment. It's all about attribution and measurable response right now. The pendulum has swung too far in that direction, if you ask me. But it's very hard to argue with numbers you can tool around with and impact directly, or with placements that you can buy into programmatically, and not on fixed sales cycles. Also, no one site or publication -- no matter how valuable its readership niche -- can outcompete the scale and the addressibility of the dozens and dozens of ad networks out there these days. (Or, at least, very few sites are perceived to be able to outcompete networks.)
Ad-supported publishing is in an unfortunate and precarious position, as this piece sadly but correctly identifies.
There are different goals of advertising. Brand awareness and purchase oriented (I forget the technical names). Most online advertising has revolved around driving purchases, with brand awareness only establishing even a non-negligible online presence fairly recently.
When someone creates the ads the ad almost always focuses on one of those two things. Purchase oriented ads are expected to produce a certain number of actual purchase, have metrics to measure their success, and have one set of techniques. Brand awareness has different metrics and generally takes different means to be successful.
My understanding (as an outsider who doesn't work directly in advertising) is that failed purchase-oriented ads are not viewed as successful brand awareness ads. If they wanted brand awareness they'd do a separate ad campaign that targets that specifically and would do a better job. So if a purchase ad fails to drive purchasing, it's still considered a failure.
> There are different goals of advertising. Brand awareness and purchase oriented (I forget the technical names). Most online advertising has revolved around driving purchases, with brand awareness only establishing even a non-negligible online presence fairly recently.
What?
> My understanding (as an outsider who doesn't work directly in advertising)
Aah. Yeah, in our market, you're not correct about brand awareness campaigns being a) recent and b) neglible. Most of our biggest spending campaigns are branding campaigns, and have been since 2007. Big caveat - I'm not in the US market.
The technical terms tend to be CPM/CPC/CPx/CPO, depending on who you're talking to - cost per thousand impressions (branding), cost per click, cost per conversion, cost per order.
Yeah, I am in the US market. My impression was that impressions were much less popular campaigns to run. But that's really an aside, and I might be wrong. :-)
My point was that (by my understanding) an ad aimed at generating clicks or conversions was measured for success by whether it generated clicks or conversions. It wouldn't be redeemed by being getting a lot of impressions if it failed on those counts. If the advertiser cared about impressions, they'd be running a campaign targeted at impressions.
Well, CPC/CPx/CPO campaigns only pay on those events, so yeah, impressions are a cost only.
But those campaigns tend to predominate on low-value inventory, whereas the branding campaigns naturally want a higher end of the market for impressions and the demographics viewing them.
Non-CPM is where Google really shines, their click-through on CPC is, AFAIK, an order of magnitude above the industry average.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you're quite correct. However, that kind of advertising works primarily in the consumer market, where repeated exposure via many different channels ultimately leads to a purchase. In software development, which is dominated by small vendors, that approach is not as workable.
In order to make you actually want to view an advertisement, though, the cost of doing so has to be low in comparison to the cost of skipping it. For TVs, this means that short spots and commercials on live content work well, and others not as well (which is reflected in the pricing for 30 second spots). For the web, adblock and "click to skip" means not even seeing an ad for the many (most?), which removes the chance to have any positive impact.
The ways forward as I see them are
Make your advertising compelling in and of itself, so that people want to see it.
Make the content that is being shown after or around the advertising so compelling that people will put up with your attempts to advertise to them (there's been a lot of pushback on such attempts on the web; does anyone bother with popups any more?).
>During the last 18 months, vendors have come to realize that advertising on Websites doesn't work at all.
Adsense seems to do pretty well (~$12 billion/year). It's been dropping a bit, and many individual sites don't do well with it, but some do quite well. Did you guys ever experiment with it and test the earnings? Adsense and networks like it have the benefit of showing retargeted ads, so you can get considerably better CTR's and ad inventory relevant to each individual user than you would get from just showing static IDE maker ads.
Closing down an institution like Dr. Dobb's can't be something you're doing lightly, but I cannot believe that there isn't some way to generate revenue from millions of engineers visiting your site every month. There are other tech publications that seem to do quite well.
Adsense for publishers worked about 10 years ago. My revenue (sdtimes.com) was about $700/month in 2004-5 or so. Not bad for virtually no work and 100% profit margin. Then $600/mo. Then $400. Then 2-3 years later down to $200/mo - meanwhile we were generating 3x the pageviews! When it got down to $140,mo we said forget it, not worth it. As did many many other publishers.
There are trillions more ad venues (pages) to advertise on vs 10 years ago. Digital advertising may have gone way up, but it's way more spread out.
How much would you need keep an operation like Dr. Dobb's alive, or to setup a similar type of operation? I have no experience around content generation or media management, so am curious if figures could be shared around the cost structure.
I've never clicked on a TV commercial, I've never clicked on a magazine, and yet both do influence purchasing behaviour.
Would you say that the online marketing fixation on hard metrics, like click-throughs, conversion rates, and page views have poisoned the well here? The engagement metrics for print and television are far softer because the complete data isn't available, they have to extrapolate from samples.
I'm surprised that sponsorship isn't more of a thing. The rise of crowd-funded projects should be studied to see if a similar thing can't be done for magazines like this journal except instead of person to creator, more company to company.
True. However, brand recognition ads occur more in the consumer space than in technical market. Especially in a market of mostly small vendors, they're trying to sell, rather than establish a perception of the brand.
I'm not sure why DDJ should be limited to software tools vendors as its core of advertisers. There are hundreds of companies with solid budgets who want to get in front of developers in general to influence technology choices and purchase decisions - especially in the SaaS, platforms, infrastructure and cloud spaces.
I don't think the problem is yours, editorially, but being a little blunter than I like to be.. I wonder if the right company owns DDJ, because this is as much as a gold rush period as any other and DDJ remains in the upper echelons of its niche.
(Disclaimer: I sell advertising of this nature on developer related properties.)
But why serve house ads repeatedly when you can tap into programmatic exchange and monetize at least a portion of those impressions? Programmatic doesn't need to be first look on all impressions.
If I'm on drdobbs.com in one tab and only being served house ads, but in my second tab I have retargeted ads being served to me, that's lost revenue for drdobbs.com
I disagree with your conclusion. I am familiar with several sites who have no problem taking in significant ad revenue on content websites. The problem is that you can't just dump random ads on a site and expect that to work, it takes a lot of effort. The best ads tends to be curated to the point of being recommendations basically, but that may or may not work for every site.
Truthfully, I've never run an ad blocker before, until over the summer I got extremely fed up with a particular web site that I keep going to out of old habit (slashdot.org). A couple times I left a browser tab on the site, and in the middle of the night some video ads started playing through the computer speakers. And over the summer, I was at the camper on a hotspot connection, and accidentally burned through my entire month's bandwidth allotment because accidentally left their front page open when I went hiking for a few hours. Again, those aggressive video ads.
So I installed an ad blocker, which actually made my 3g wifi hotspot usable over the summer. (Yes, I should stop visiting sites that get too annoying with aggressive ads, or I should just selectively block those sites).
Omg, what the hell kind of dark pattern is it that waits 10 minutes to start playing an audio ad?
Slashdot's audio ads don't wait 10 minutes to start. Slashdot's much hated auto-refresh "feature" is to blame.
It periodically refreshes the page and brings you a new crop of ads, some of which might be audio ads.
The auto-refresh "feature" merely exists to increase their ad revenue. Nobody I know likes the auto-refresh feature, as it just causes you to lose your place on the page.
Truthfully, I've never run an ad blocker before, until over the summer I got extremely fed up with a particular web site that I keep going to out of old habit (slashdot.org). A couple times I left a browser tab on the site, and in the middle of the night some video ads started playing through the computer speakers. And over the summer, I was at the camper on a hotspot connection, and accidentally burned through my entire month's bandwidth allotment because accidentally left their front page open when I went hiking for a few hours. Again, those aggressive video ads.
Slashdot's auto-refresh, which can't be disabled without some technical tinkering, is horrible, just horrible. I've left feedback that they should include an option to disable auto-refresh, but was ignored. I guess it's more profitable to ignore your users and force more ads on them.
I installed Adblock Plus and tweaked some Chrome settings to get the system to mostly ignore Slashdot's horrible auto-refresh. It still sometimes scrolls my page a bit, though, which is still annoying.
3. Are quite tired of highly intrusive, epileptic-seizure-inducing flash ads (some of them with audio).
4. Security reasons ( I personally use Noscript which has the side-effect of blocking ads)
5. Simply refuse to accept tracking cookies.
I wouldn't mind viewing unobtrusive text or image ads without tracking cookies (eg: StackOverflow) but very few websites actually implement those. I asked the owner of Phoronix.com about this a while back (who also seems to be having issues with the financial side of things)- Basically unobtrusive ads have much lower value than the obtrusive ones.
For publications in markets with a large number of vendors, the pool of vendors who still see advantage in web ads (such as ads that don't expect purchases, say, as for an upcoming movie) will sustain them. But the software development tools market is small with fewer than 100 vendors, many of which don't advertise at all.
So, essentially, there just was not enough advertising to keep us going.