We’re dropping Google Ads

I've been on the fence about this for a while, and after reading what GroundUp wrote, I can't agree with them more. So I think it's time for me to dump Google Ads from my sites, as well. I send Big G three million ad impressions a month, and in return I get $150 and a bunch of visual dreck that makes the site look bad. $200, if I'm lucky. And this is all U.S. traffic on an award-winning news site. I only need to sell one more local ad to more than make up for the loss, and I get the extra benefit of having only quality, relevant advertising on my site.

So to quote GroundUp: "Obviously the behemoth in Mountain View won’t miss [us], but we take some pride in saying the feeling’s mutual."

Off topic: this is the first time I've heard of GroundUp, and I really like the "Dear Editor" format of the comment page on this site.

I'm used to seeing mainstream newspaper websites with downright toxic commenting environments, so seeing "Dear Editor" followed by a thought-out response is very refreshing. Maybe they have a "better" readership/screening process/whatever, but I think this higher quality commenting behavior is in part due to how GroundUp has simply tweaked the wording of the comment box interface - by framing the comment with "Dear Editor".

When I started with Google ads, Google was classier than other ad networks. Other ad networks were stuffed with free ringtones, sketchy supplements and other scams.

Then at some point Google gave me the option to opt out of various objectionable topics and soon Google ads got as bad as the others. Maybe Google bought the bad ad networks, or partnered with them or something.

Quite a bit of subtext is largely unexamined. AT&T and Verizon, two of the biggest advertisers, have pulled out from YouTube. AT&T is the biggest pay TV provider in the US now (DirecTV) and Verizon wishes you would watch Go90 so they could sell ads against it. Both of them benefit if ad spend goes elsewhere than YouTube.

Ad networks regularly serve various forms of malware and spyware, as well as tracking beacons that put my data at risk of being stolen or misused. And once it's in a database somewhere, it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen and someone attempts to hijack accounts or steal an identity.

It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. When you take away the option to protect myself, you accept responsibility for attacks. After all, if it's morally/legally wrong to alter the presentation of the content they serve, then they also morally/legally responsible for incidents when they serve it improperly and cause losses/damages. Quite obviously it's not financially viable for them to pay for their negligence, and so it's also not financially viable for me to trust that a site won't host some sort of attack vector.

The pennies of advertising revenue earned from my modest browsing over the course of a year doesn't pay nearly enough to compensate for the time I lose through dealing with malicious ads. Unless online advertising cleans itself up, adblockers will be the best option. And sites that don't respect that aren't sites I'm interested in.

For smaller websites (also referred to the democratization of the internet), I am sure many people may (or have) feel (felt) guilty for using an ad-blocker.

Then you see all those shitty ads for:

- finding a russian bride

- getting rich through some millionaires secret

- anti-aging remedies

- adware

and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.

People keep saying that "journalism is dying", but this industry and its ad-model isn't very "old" in historical terms. For every Business Insider that dies, the world will carry on. For quality journalism (an oxymoron of sorts) and news that matters to people and their circumstances, I assume people will keep forking out money (like they do for The Economist).

If someone smarter than myself can elaborate, how is Googles business-model for ads on 3rd-party websites sustainable for the long-term?

I think this speaks for 1000s and 1000s of small(er) website publishers. All squeezed by Google.

For example, we run a website having millions of page views a month. And similarly frustrated.

If we can divide the slot between 10 advertisers directly, we might make much more. Perhaps even double than what Adsense pays. The only reason, why we don't attempt that is time and effort getting directed in an unwanted direction.

And many small businesses are always struggling for bandwidth to do the core job (and projects that enthuse them). And Google is getting full advantage of this situation.[1]

Sometime back, I even wrote to them on falling CPCs (eCPMs) but of course, Google has a culture of not replying.

Its amazing to see, Internet living with a broken Ad model, for so long. I can't wait for a browser like Brave to take off. Where we can collect an ultra small amount from users for pageview, and still make more than Adsense.

[1] I suspect, this squeeze is happening more recently, because Google itself is feeling the pinch from Facebook. As its stealing a lot of its Ad revenue.

I started, ran an sold an ad based business in 2008. To say that most of the activity in the ad space was dubious back then is a complete understatement.

Most of our traffic to the adverts was generated, purely to syphon off money from the advertisers and we established this by fingerprinting the traffic with JS tools at the client side. This was what let me to the conclusion that the business is dysfunctional, the customers at best are getting wildly ripped off, their privacy effectively sold off and they open themselves up to huge amounts of malware too.

Advertising is a horrible business model. But until a new way is found, people/businesses don't have any other choice of marketing their activities.

I totally stand by the publication. Any publication that really cares about it's readers will try to find another way.

(Edit: I am viewing this page on a Brave Browser, check it out, it has ad blocking and publisher micropayments built in https://brave.com)

I always imagined that some website/mobile app/service would appear that would let you buy subscriptions for access to multiple publishers at once. I think people have a hard time spending $5 here a month $10 there a month, but would spend maybe $49 for a range of access to sites. I don't know why something like that hasn't taken off yet. You could pick the sites you want access to or they could do a pay out based on where you went and what you read.

The ad driven models are slowly killing publishing. They're right in what they're saying - their competition is clickbait that just wants attention. A view is a view, and an ad will pay out the same regardless of the quality of the content on the page. I really hope we find a way to distribute payment for quality content in a better way. It's something that I've been working on personally because I like publishing content, and I hate having to choose between marring my content with ads, or losing money if I hit the front page of reddit.

I recently tried putting Google ads on one of my websites. Over the course of 10,000 page views Google shows there were only 7 click throughs.

It does not even make sense because it means there was basically zero mis-clicks. I don't know how they count a click-through but it seems to be more than just someone clicking on the ad.

Also I'm pretty tired of hearing how Google are the good guys and 'do no evil'. It's obvious through their latest YouTube scandals and AdSense they are literally stealing billions of dollars from individuals around the world.

My experience with google ads was not great. I once ran google ads for my mom's online shop. Before, there was a constant stream of visitors and revenue. With google ads, the visitor rate went up crazy - the revenue, not at all! Despite the fact that the ad was very specific for what you could buy for how much. Once the google ad credits were all used up, the visitors rate dropped to almost zero. As if google was punishing us for not running ads anymore.

I too deal with Google as a "publisher", and some of my experiences are similar to theirs. For example the odd way that they complain about certain forms of content, apparently prompted by an algorithm and unchecked by a human.

It seems to me that Google is a kind of corporate "Rain Man" - they have amazing abilities, and yet there are also these astonishing failures to deal with problems which could easily be resolved by a normal corporation.

I've been saying that the ad model is broken for a while, and prescribing a real fix for it: a new form of native advertising that actually benefits the user. My company, PLEENQ[1], makes it so users can hover over an image and click on the individual products within it to go where they can buy the product. Here's a demo video: https://youtu.be/V_oTtDUV0yI

My solution is to basically build features around the content of sites that enhance the areas of the site that already attract the users. More importantly, it simplifies the revenue model that the article talks about -- people click on your links and make purchases, and you get a share of every single purchase (CPA). The important thing is that it's compatible with any other revenue models a site might use. If, like GroundUp, they take donations, then it's just an extra revenue source on top of that.

I looked on GroundUp.org for building an example video of how that would work so I could show the community, but it doesn't really fit the model of PLEENQ. Regardless, there are a vast number of niches that this new form of native advertising would drastically improve the revenue for. Imagine an auto blog showing a picture of an engine, and you being able to hover over any part within the picture and purchase it from Auto Zone.

Another thing is that it can be used to split between revenue generating links, and informational links. Perhaps you have a news site, and a lot of your articles have pictures of politicians that your users might not be familiar with -- how about hovering over that person and being able to click on them to go to their Wikipedia page? I think that would greatly benefit a user browsing the site, and wouldn't cheapen in any way the experience of the site itself (in fact would greatly improve it).

[1] http://pleenq.com

Adsense has became a less and less attractive option. Ad quality is poor, revenue per click lower and lower, policies are enforced weirdly and keep changing, force you to display annoying cookie modals, etc.

I had a bit silly idea about financing of web services.

Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB.

Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP header. Or you could add artificial latency to every request.

Then you sell those useless bytes or milliseconds. Your bytes could really be unicode glyphs. Example: a dollar for every byte per month. When a user leases a specific byte you can send it to him by an e-mail for increased silliness factor. He leased it, so it will not be sent to anyone else as long as he pays.

That way you can specify a ceiling of profits. 500kB at one dollar per kB can bring you at most $500k per month. It seems fair, a bit like Patreon targets.

I thought about doing a service this way. And even a platform - providing web server configs and plug-ins that would do all this selling of bytes process, also payment processor for bytes that would also run on the idea.

You really need different monetization for different kinds of sites.

1) Low quality, high volume, low overhead: google ads.

2) High quality/high value, low volume, niche: subscription/services

3) Medium quality, low volume, niche: donation

The only form of advertising I'd ever want on my site, unless it is a very low quality, is direct sold by my own staff (i.e. me). I'd probably optimize for effort and just do a single "sponsor" for each month, or maybe ongoing. The low-touch way is probably to pick a relevant CPA program (say, Audible) and pitch that to your own audience.

I often wonder how much revenue my hometown newspaper makes off online adds -- http://newspressnow.com.

When you first go to the site, a Credit Karma ad or Rite Aid ad popup appears (promoted by Kixer).

Close that and you see a site just overwhelmed by ads, some local. Then they have the "Sponsored Links" by Content.ad saying:

- "Cheaper and Stronger than Adderral"

- "Don't watch this video around you wife <insert photo of model>"

- "Fruits that fight diabetes"

- "Biblical solutions to weight loss"

The local owners of the newspaper, sold their cable company for $350 million which they had owned for 45 years (Cablevision->Suddenlink).

If an exceptionally wealthy local newspaper owner can't offer content in a reasonable way without egregious deceptive links, who can?

This type of behavior should be heavily criticized, especially by those who can afford to avoid it. Instead, it's considered business as usual.

I noticed how civil all the comments are. I wonder if automatically prepending all comments with "Dear Editor" makes people think twice before writing the more common and nasty form of comments usual found in the comment sections of news pages?

I added this article to /. (Slashdot) and it was marked as spam, sending it's rating black and instantly damaging it's chance of being seen, yet here it has proper and full engagement?!? How did someone at /. consider this spam? Hopefully someone here can shed some light.

It's such a weird time to be alive: with all the controversy around advertising nowadays we're kind of seeing Google's previously invulnerable tendrils around the Internet slowly being peeled off. That being their major source of income, they must be worried. I am too, but for another reason -- I don't want a company like Facebook taking over and establishing a monopoly (say what you will about Google, companies like Facebook are even less ethical).

This might be a stupid question, but is it possible to monetise a website successfully using entirely "dumb" adverts with no ad networks involved?

I mean ads which are simply an image inside an <a> tag. Presumably this is how everyone was doing it before the ad networks existed? (I was around in the 90s but never really thought about it.)

I guess it would take a lot of extra work and expense to approach potential advertisers and make deals. But on the upside you could host only well-curated ads that are relevant to your audience. Presumably they would also be difficult to block (although I suppose ad blockers could start recognising images, maybe they do this already?)

Has anyone had any success doing this? Is it likely to become more common as ad blocking increases?

I feel like I'm missing something incredibly obvious!

At some point, someone is going to turn static visual (and text, I suppose) ads (back, per the "text" part) into a competitive advantage. Why? Because they actually get through. For the graphics, forcefully stripped of any meta-data and corners of the format that can become mal-ware vectors.

I'll put up with ads that don't move or make noise at me. And that don't/can't try to infect me.

But, no one wants to do that.

Stalemate.

My fear is that, in addition to increasingly locking down the web, the new DRM extensions will be used to force (crap-laden) ads upon us. Content and crap will all get packaged up together, as an encrypted binary. Et voilà, no more open Web.

P.S. Yeah, I don't want to look at gross medical ads, either. So, I guess I have a few more qualifications, personally.

> our articles get much more traffic on mainstream media that republish us, but we receive no advertising revenue from this

Um, so, shouldn't you be charging a syndication fee, probably a percentage of their ads displayed on your articles?

Honestly, I won't use an ad-blocker if the ads weren't so creepily targeted and so annoyingly pervasive. Hell, I don't even mind looking and clicking on some ads if they are not intrusively shoved down my throat.

I fully acknowledge the frustration with AdSense. And their rules are prudish and seemingly intermittent in nature-- at one's whim, if you get my meaning. I see nothing wrong with the above image and there is no nudity involved. I've seen more skin on a public beach.

The real question at this point is, how are you going to pay for your site? I realize AdSense payments are tiny, but they are at least something. How do you plan on replacing those payments? Our site wouldn't be able to pay our writers without that tiny bit of revenue.

In any case, I applaud your efforts and wish you the best.

A large problem here is that ads only support one type of content: low-cost and large-audience.

Content ads, more or less, offer a fixed amount per impression. Sure, you might get a higher ad price for certain audiences than others, but this is related to topic, not the quality or cost of content.

If you only make a fixed amount per impression, the only business model low-cost content targeting a large audience. High quality (aka high cost) content, with a narrow interest audience needs a different model.

That different model is probably charging your reader. However, the moment you set up a paywall, the content disappears. Search engines will not suggest the content, feed readers can't access it, suggestion interfaces won't suggest it, etc. The content might as well not exist.

We don't need micropayments. We need a model where paywall content can be discovered. Systems whereby paywall content can be accessed by aggregators who then can suggest/search/deliver the content, but will not give the content to users without payment.

I applaud the advertisers. For a good long while racists were afraid or ashamed to push their racism too publicly. I liked that world, less hate and venom being spewed around poisoning the public sphere. But something snapped in the last few years and all the assholes have become loud and proud of their assholiness and they are celebrated and encouraged to be the biggest asshole they can possibly be. From what I can tell it is linked to gaming and 4chan, a new culture of young aggressive males raised on shock and gore and porn and no consequences. For the good of civilization this needs to be bottled up. Racists need to be ashamed again. Assholes need to return to pretending to be decent human beings. The great human achievement that makes civilized society possible is keeping testorene fueled young males under some control to allow things to be built up instead of always being torn down. If we lose that then everything is lost.

That's awesome to hear. In particular reading the comments and finding that this sentiment is echoed among many of us.

For what it's worth, some of us just never stopped putting cool and interesting content online, for free, without monetizing it with ads (except perhaps as a short-duration experiment in the early 2000s when this madness started taking off).

If I wanted to get paid to let someone shit all over and between that content/media, I'd be writing/designing very different content. ... unless maybe it was an art project to explicitly demonstrate the fragility of excellence (okay maybe that's a cool idea actually--this besides the point :p)

"Less than $200" seems like a very small amount of money for 329,000 impressions. I imagine the number might be higher if the readers were mostly from the US, instead of South Africa.

But still, you're not going to make a lot of money from a few hundred thousand impressions. In my experience, a YouTube video with 1,000,000 views will give you around $1,000. That's nowhere near enough to sustain a company or pay any employees.

Right now I'm working on a game (which I hope to launch soon and show on HN!). While I dislike ads, I'm still going to put them in my game, because I enjoy making money more than I hate ads. I think Google and AdMob will mostly serve ads for other games, so they're not so bad.

If malware writers can get toasters to mine bitcoin a browser should be able to do the same for content creators, this would incentize people to make more engaging content the longer people stay on your page the more you make.

Interesting to see this on HN. I use AdMob in my app. Do my stats seem normal to you guys? ~70-100k impressions a day = ~$4-9, not enough for me to eat...

pics of the details can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/NDubFOO.png

Please help: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactnative/comments/64wwge/ads_mak...

The real problem is that Google approves pretty much everyone for AdSense. Which works in favor of scammers and plagiarism. Someone scrapes content from respectable sites, parse them through an article spinning mechanism and voila, you have a legitimate looking site with absolutely no original content on it. Google shouldn't be approving any of those sites for ads. But they do, and that's a bit shocking for all of us who grew fond of them because of the "do no evil" mantra. Well Google, you're doing evil and perhaps it's time to do something about it.

If google would simply charge a "review fee" for new adverts, or when a target for an advert changes (via detection), that could cover the cost of manual review. Another fee to "challenge" review, etc...

This would allow good advertisers to pay once or twice a month for reviews on new ad campaigns and the spammy throw it all at the wall campaigns less likely. But google isn't interested in quality... but quantity, so they can charge higher rates per view/click.

Google Ads I've put on my koszek.com once. Then while doing some layout changes I saw all sorts of things being displayed. Some really inappropriate -- in my Google Summer of Code writeups I got some ulcer and sex-related ads. And I removed it then, never looked back. Not worth compromising your quality.

Right now I only use Amazon Affiliate and I guess only because it's (a) easy to get a link to the books I review (b) they are actually controlled by me, at least in theory. No flipping products Amazon is randomly sending me.

Seeing posts like these always send me back to when I was reading comments saying that Google needs to track you all over the web because that's how it serves you "relevant ads".

How is that working so far? For all the tracking Google does through Google analytics, Google search, and the Play Android framework, you'd think ads would be a lot better by now.

What's funny is that Google seems quick to fire publishers but it's never so quick to fire advertisers.

It's interesting how the comments on that page are so respectful. I wonder if it's entirely due to the templated "Dear Editor" and "Sincerely" formatting, i.e. remove those words and I wouldn't infer the same perception of respectfulness, that the templating encourages more respectful comments, or just good moderation and I can't see all the bad comments that have been submitted but not shown.

Google incentivizes so much of the content you read on the web, it's fair to say it's "Google's web" at the moment. What alternatives are there though? People can try dropping adsense, but for most websites it would hurt them more than they can handle. I wish there were better advertising systems, but, compared to the rest, adsense is actually better. Advertisers need to come up with better ideas.

Months ago I was excited to get google ads into my app and monetize a project on google play for the first time ever.

After a few dozen bucks, the ads turned into virus scams, +18 hotlines, which I am pretty sure I unchecked the last time I logged into admob's web interface, so I removed it. Good riddance.

Now thanks to google (ironically) I sell in-app purchases to enable features.

> Perhaps at some point online publishers [will] find a new way to solicit advertising from reputable companies that pay properly.

Someone get on this.