WeblogsInc ad intrusion |
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It’s a bit awkward writing a post like this because it’s sort of against what I do on the web: I make money on the web. The web is part of my lifeblood and in this post I’m going to sound like somebody who is anti-business, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m all for advertising, really I am. Look around this blog, there are banner ads. There are advertising text links and affiliate links. I don’t have any problem with a site making money legitimately and in fact I encourage bloggers, writers and webmasters to make money on the web. I don’t want anybody to work for free unless they want to work for free.
In saying that though there are still limits — this isn’t a blank checkbook — to which I want to be advertised to as a reader and some sites out there that I enjoy reading are increasingly having their content being disrupted by too much advertising. It’s unfortunate when these sites don’t offer me any way of reading their content except by the ad saturation model. Is this a sign of desperation on the part of publishers? If it is, then it’s pretty transparent and pathetic.
WeblogsInc (WIN) co-founder, Jason Calacanis, has written several times that he is against mixing advertising with editorial because that will make their publication some sort of journalistic sellout. I submit to you now, that while WIN may not have ads or affiliate links inside their often short blog content entries, they do have something worse slipping into their content space.
Take a look at the screenshot above and see if you can see it. Though it doesn’t illustrate mixing ads with editoral, do you find these type ads intrusive? To be fair, it’s not just WIN doing these kinds of overlays, you see them on full page ads (that you have to click to skip from major sites like Forbes and now even ZDnet is doing this sometimes as well). If you click in from RSS feeds sometimes you go immediately to these FPA and then have to click skip, just like most people do on Flash intros. Waste of time and bandwidth.
And yet some people do click on these ads or these publishers wouldn’t do them. I wonder how many click them accidentally? It’s like that X1 spy camera popup from awhile back that infiltrated every browser on the planet … stupid people were buying those cameras or they wouldn’t have kept the campaign running.
If you brush the mouse pointer anywhere near the Circuit City “expand” text in the WIN site then immediately that ad will fill the browser screen and invade the editorial space that Mr. Calacanis finds to be such sacred ground. Sometimes on the page load it fills up and overtakes the editorial.
These are the new breed of popups and yes, they could be axed using Greasemonkey or some other workaround coding, but how about some sort of positive dialogue between reader and publisher where both sides understand what they are looking for?
I’m not looking to WIN or any other publication to be assaulted with advertising, and yet at the same time if I enjoy the content I’m definitely willing to pay for it. We went down this road with popups and look where it took us? Almost every major toolbar now has popup blockers. Programs like GreaseMonkey are borne out of users totally frustrated that they have to constantly read around the not so cleverly placed noise to get to the ever diminishing signal.
This makes it really, really tough being a WIN reader — and the other sites that do this too — because there is increased advertising saturation and so little content. Think I’m wrong? Take a look at the screenshot below when you first visit one of their blogs that I happen to enjoy, Cinematical:
Using Screen Calipers, I measured the content to ad space with no toolbars enabled, which increases the content area. The resolution is 1024×768, although I ran a sidebar which removes about 100 pixels on the right side (not shown). The content shown above: 456 x 175. The adverising space on the right: 380 x 519. There are four different ad panels and two content panels when you visit the home page of the blog above. The top masthead strip advertises their other blogs, so that’s internal advertising, beneath that is a large advertising banner. Beneath that you have a logo 320×72 and then a second full sized Flash banner. Beneath that, finally you’ll see the content, sandwiched between another large flash ad on the right and then a long strip of Google ads between the roughly 60% width content area, which still has Google ads running between the editorial of stories (for a total of three Google adsense ads on each page).
WIN is growing and has over 70 bloggers as of this writing and maybe it’s time for them to consider — or reconsider — offering their readers options to buy out of this over-advertising? I realize paying writers isn’t cheap and I’m really not asking for them to hurt their business financially, but I submit — and it’s just my opinion here — what they are doing to readers is cheap.
They already cripple the RSS feeds because they are worried about theft there, but then they put ads in there too (why place ads with text excerpts of mostly already short content?), and when you land at their site the content — some of which is quite good, actually — is invaded by advertising like the Circuit City ad shown above.
Meanwhile, Mr. Calacanis brags about how they are making $1000 or $2000 a day from Google Adsense and how he must keep their publication sacred from advertising in the editorial and yet their entire page is littered with ads almost anywhere and everywhere an ad will fit, including between the editorial. Mark Cuban’s blog was able to stay ad-free at WIN, so somebody has some pull over there.
Argh. Enough guys, please. Do you really want to punish your readers this way? Be a little different and don’t copy the major news organizations which will be dead with this advertise-them-to-death model within 10 years if they don’t get creative.
Jason or Brian, have you guys given any serious thought to offering a paid subscription option that gets rid of all the ads and actually offers your readers pure content (for their personal use only, not for syndication)? I’m only one reader of a few of your blogs and I’d visit your sites more if you offered a reasonably priced option to get to the content and avoid all these intrusive ads. Please.
If you think every reader loves all this advertising then you are wrong. As you add more advertising and less content you might have a temporary positive cash infusion in the bank account but long term you’re alienating readers and you’ll only encourage people to create programs and workaround which remove and strip all your advertising anyway.
Jason Calcanis also believes:
1. Users should be very, very vocal with web services companies (including us!).
2. Web 2.0 companies listen to user feedback obsessively
There, a user has spoken. Let’s see if and/or how much Web 2.0 WIN is about? Please give us readers, users, whatever you want to call us an ad cancellation option for a fee. Slashdot does. Will WIN?
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When I saw the first ad I spit out my coffee! We don’t accept ads like that… I HATE THEM. It turns out it was a 3rd party network advertisement and some how it snuck by us. It was only on Cinematical and maybe TVSquad. We added the third party code and forgot to turn off the “Show obnoxious ads people hate!” option.
We banned them… you shouldn’t see them again. My apologies…. they are obnoxious.
In terms of the second point of the number of ads up top: most of the advertising network require you have ads in the first 500 pixels in order to make decent money. So, I came up with this concept of the double leaderboard (leaderboard, logo, leaderboard, content). It’s aggressive… I agree. However, this new format does pay for the 10+ bloggers we have on TVSquad on Cinemtical and we’ve found that people just hit page down the second they get to the site. Then from that point forward you have 15 blog posts and like 2-3 google ads. I don’t think it’s such a big deal to do a page down when I get to the site. If you look at the investment we are making in Cinematical and TVSquad it is very significant (Cinematical is doing 25 posts a day with 10 bloggers, TVSquad is doing 15-20 posts a day with 15 bloggers)
Come on now… we have not crippled the RSS feeds! We put Google AdSense ad at the bottom of each, and the headline/excerpt feed is still ad free. Crippled is a little hyperbolic I think… we have to make money from the feeds and scrolling past a thin Google Adsense advertisement is no biggie. I think we are going to come up with a PAID RSS feed at some point that s full stories and ad free. There seems to be some demand for it.
The other thing that is helping is that we are converting advertisers from the banner ad formats to the advertising post format which I find is much more effective and interesting, not to mention less intrusive. You can see these at www.autoblog.com. We are trying to get the advertisers to write spin-free copy that just explains their product.
The bottom line is you support our advertisers if you like our blogs and be psyched that we can get them up there!
Thanks for pointing out the big CC ad… I could see that setting you off… trust me, it set me off here at WIN HQ!
Comment by Jason — June 13, 2005 @ 12:34 pm PST
Thanks for the explanation and removing the overlay, Jason. I think many publishers would be surprised just how many readers are willing to pay not to have to suffer through ads.
Comment by TDavid — June 13, 2005 @ 1:12 pm PST
The question is how much can we charge…. if 1,000 people sign up at $20 a year it’s only $20,000 and not worth the effort/time. That is the problem for us… it has to be simple/cheap to impliment.
Comment by Jason — June 13, 2005 @ 1:15 pm PST
$20,000 not worth the effort and time? I bet a basic subscription ad cancellaction program across network could be done for about $2,500-5,000. Using your numbers, that sounds like 15k profit to me. Others will take it if you guys don’t want to
Comment by TDavid — June 13, 2005 @ 1:33 pm PST
You would need someone to manage the paid subscribers, do customer support, and accounting. 1,000 subscribers would require a couple of hundreds hours of support a year. At $25 an hour that’s another 5k in costs…. so, you’re at 10k in profits I think.
Focusing on a 10k market as opposed to the 10M advertising market just doesn’t make sense for us. We’re focusing on the 99% of folks who want amazing content that is free due to advertising support. If you look at how much content there is on THE WHOLE PAGE–not just the first screen–I think you’ll see we are in great shape.
Why don’t you do a survey of the entire page and count up the pixels dedicated to advertisng and to content (don’t just subtrack one from the other since that is not apples to apples due to white space, navigation, logos, etc). Just count up the advertising spots and the content… you’ll see we’re in really great shape. We’re top heavy… but people spend 1-2 seconds up top… then the pain is out of the way
best j
Comment by Jason — June 13, 2005 @ 2:40 pm PST
Jason - We both know that the first page — no scroll — is where the prime Real Estate is at. People don’t like scrolling. You essentially said this yourself in your first comment above.
As for “pain” being out of the way, again that would be in the eye of the beholder. I just checked and you have one of three page sections devoted to content and the rest is mostly ads and self promotion (clever calling that “navigation” but most of what’s there doesn’t fit that definition).
In fact, nearly half the current browser scroll on Cinematical contains two empty columns — why? That’s just unused, wasted space that the content could wrap into when the side columns have no content. It would also add to the page overall look and feel and be less advertising-heavy, even though it’s just stretching pixels.
I think what you’ve done with the whole stars thing is excellent and commendable and it’s great that you include people. Hey, look who’s #7 on that top 20 list. Certainly don’t want to bite a feeding hand here, so hopefully you are taking this as constructive and not destructive feedback
Also just noticed that you moved the search bar up into the wasted white space formerly next to the Cinematical logo (which is too big too, BTW, if you are going to have all that other ad space in the header space).
Managing subscribers? Hundreds of hours a year per 1,000 paid subscribers are top heavy administration fees and would likely be the result of an inferior designed backend system to handle the subscription flow process.
EXAMPLE. Contact Leo Laporte or one of the other TWIT.tv guys and ask them how much customer support time they have alloted for their donation subscribers to their TWIT.tv radio shows (via PayPal, btw)?
I seriously doubt they have budgeted hundreds of hours for their cause. Yes, you are correct that there does need to be somebody to answer subscriber Q & A, but I’m sure an organization your size already has people in place to handle customer support questions? Probably those people are assigned to advertisers (who unfortunately seemed to slip by an ad that was totally against your guidelines). One simply must segregate the workload for those who pay vs. those who freeload so the paying subscribers get priority response.
Comment by TDavid — June 13, 2005 @ 3:19 pm PST
yes, the top of the page is where the action is and as such what advertisers are willing to pay for. Scrolling a little big down the page is no big deal… the people who can’t handle that are like .01% or .00001% of the population–you’re the first person to say anything so that should tell you something. In your case you should pay us for an ad-free version…. let me know what blogs you want ad free and I’ll make a special RSS feed for TDAVID for each one for $25 a year each (.50 a week… cheap!).
>> In fact, nearly half the current browser scroll
>> on Cinematical contains two empty columns — why?
>> That’s just unused, wasted space that the content
>> could wrap into when the side columns have no content.
>> It would also add to the page overall look and feel
>> and be less advertising-heavy, even though it’s just
>> stretching pixels.
We don’t like the blog column being more then ~425 pixels wide. It is easier to read when you wrap at like 400-500 pixels. So, we wouldn’t use that extra space for the blog posts.
You’ll see some more content in there shortly… things like “Top 100 stories of all time” etc. You’ll also see us fill that space up with more advertising… we’re experimenting with CPA stuff on BloggingBaby right now in fact… so expect that area to light up like Time Square… well, not that bad.
Thanks for the feedback… you’re a little over the top and nitpicking… but hey, you were right about the popopen Circuit City ad so i’ll give you some props for that.
we’re a work in progress and getting better every day thanks to playa hating constuctive feedback from folks like you.
best j
Comment by Jason — June 13, 2005 @ 3:39 pm PST
Wow, we go from: “Users should be very, very vocal with web services companies (including us!).” to “you’re a little over the top and nitpicking” and “we’re a work in progress and getting better every day thanks to playa hating constuctive feedback from folks like you.”
Er, ok … Me thinks you are taking this too personal, Jason.
No, I don’t want, nor was I requesting, a TDavid-only RSS custom feed, but that’s a curious offer considering I’m a programmer. You are welcome to send me a link if/when you ever decide to do something like this for all your readers, and sure, I’ll throw a few bones to your cause. Especially if the content remains as good as it is now on those few blogs of yours that I do read. Whether you want to believe it or not, if I didn’t like what you were doing on a few of your blogs I never would have made this post.
And most readers aren’t going to give you this level of technical detail about your site — either privately or publically. They’ll just unsubscribe and go elsewhere. Quietly.
If you think I’m wrong about this, then run a poll on your site and ask the rest of your readers what they think of the current level of ad saturation. Post back the link here and I’ll be happy to post the results and we’ll see if my comments are representative of 01% or .00001% of your readers.
Again, and this is maybe the most important part of my commentary that you seem to be missing, I actually do enjoy some of your content — THANK YOU. Just can’t stand the current ad saturation and that you don’t provide readers with any way to PAY to opt-out outside of doing their own custom programming (Greasemonkey or scraping your content).
Do with this info what you will, including absolutely nothing. I really don’t care that much — if you don’t.
This is my last comment on the matter as we both have better things to do with our time. Just keep my suggestions in mind, please.
Comment by TDavid — June 13, 2005 @ 4:34 pm PST
I’m just busting your chops…. you know that.
You’ve got some valid points… even if you’ve got to much time on your hands (zing!)
best jdawg
Comment by Jason — June 14, 2005 @ 4:47 pm PST
WeblogsInc Ad Intrusion
Online advertising is a long-term cat and mouse game….
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