This seems to fit the narrative of a broader wave of consolidation hitting the old-school web.
Like it or not, there are real advantages to walled gardens like facebook. To ad buyers, it's a single platform where one can target the entire world person-by-person -- even across multiple devices (iPad, phone, laptop), with hyper-accurate segmentation and user tracking, strong identity services with all the abuse/spam prevention and payment capability that enables, multi-lingual, optimized CDN-based distribution to ensure all content is fast and cheaply delivered to every corner of the globe (an especially big deal given the rise of video ads), mobile-first UX that works across every conceivable handset including iOS and every esoteric variant of Android, etc.
I'm not pleased about a lot of this, but it's a mistake to deny what's happening.
You don't need a walled garden for that. You would need some client-side listeners.
Walled gardens arise because our legal system incentivizes it. Network effects are unnatural online. There is no barrier to access or information flow here -- put simply, there are no real walls to protect the garden. They're all artificially imposed barriers.
With improved laws, no one would be able to hold the web-accessible data hostage, and competition would be based on consumer-facing concerns like user experience and customer service.
Until we get to that point, which makes up the foundation of all competition in the physical world, the potential of the internet will continue to be squandered. It's very important to wake people up to these issues, since no one really seems to discuss them.
I find this line ironic since the Network Effect (or Metcalfe's Law) was created to describe literal computer networks.
Network effects don't happen in the physical world nearly as easily because the bar, grocery store, or whatever is limited by geography. They can only address a population within a certain radius and can't grow beyond it.
Transportation hubs - like airports - may be an exception because the more places you can get from one airport, the more likely you are to use that airport.. if you even have a choice.
>I find this line ironic since the Network Effect (or Metcalfe's Law) was created to describe literal computer networks.
The distinction is that it refers to physical networks (and iirc, referred initially to phone systems, not computer systems per se). At layer 1, the network effect is still very much valid and caused by the capabilities of the physical hardware. This is forgotten because today everyone is plugged into the same network. This was not always the case.
Because Metcalfe's Law exists, people have misunderstood it to apply to cyberspace and incorrectly believed it's simply the way things have to be. This is not so.
The compatibility concern at the core of real network effects, where the hardware buy will be dictated by what the most neighbors have, are not relevant once you have a physical hookup.
In cyberspace, layers 2 and up, there is no physical limitation on compatibility. There are only digits (hence the term "digital") upon which computations are made (hence "computers"). If the correct computations can be performed (i.e., if you possess hardware that can convert the electrical pulses to the expected digits and software (drivers, browsers, etc.) that can decode the digits to match expectations), the desired data can be presented.
Since network effects refer exclusively to physical compatibility, we only see this in the digital realm because it's artificially imposed. The law says that anyone who tries to extricate data from, e.g., Facebook will be severely punished, despite the fact that Facebook does not have a copyright interest in the data, and that as long as such extrication is done responsibly, it would have 0 impact on Facebook's ability to conduct its operations.
That's an artificial barrier that we've concocted, and it's the only mechanism by which network effects can work in cyberspace. Without the legal risk, people would read the data out from Facebook and recast, repopulate, etc. in alternate hypermedia. People would also make writable interfaces available. Facebook would then have to compete on its ability to provide a superior user experience, like most other businesses, not the availability of the data that they've misappropriated from users.
Social networks like Facebook have forced themselves between the open network and the data that used to be exposed to it, insisting that all traffic must be subject to their conditions. There's no reason to allow that!
Once the online marketplace is subject to the same types of competition that exist in the physical marketplace, i.e., once everyone is allowed to compete over the same core of knowledge, things are going to drastically improve.
I appreciate your thinking, but your understanding and application of networks, as well as your decidedly wishful thinking that they don't apply online, is simply wrong.
Mind: I'd much rather this not be the case, but it simply is.
Metcalfe's function is, by the way, also incorrect. Very few networks are comprised of nodes of equal value, instead the nodal (and inter-nodal) value tends to follow a power function (Zipf's Law), with one suggestion being that the value function of a network with peer-to-peer connections then be:
V = n * log(n) (Tilly-Odlyzko).
I see even that as incomplete, as networks also generate negative interactions, though by their nature, Metcalfe's formula applies, with some constant, such that the network cost imposed by nodes is:
C = k * n^2
Putting those together, a clear corollary is that the maximum feasible size of the network is dependent on the cost function constant.
What you're failing to consider is that the members of a network, including both the users and advertisers, are themselves components of that network, and have their own value and cost calculations to be applied. For large advertising networks, the fact that 1) larger markets with 2) more customers can be approached with 3) fixed costs for the advertiser and 4) efficiencies of scale for the network operator (e.g., Facebook or Google, approximately 2/3 of all online advertising), then there will automatically be an advantage to larger networks, provided k is sufficiently small.
There's nothing artificial about those barriers.
Incidentally, you can find network or dendritic structures in any system in which you have nodes or elements, and links or relationships: transport and communications systems, cities, even knowledge or information itself (think of the terms "knowledge web" or "information web").
I've never cared for Facebook and am finding Google increasingly evil and/or incompetent (and am torn as to whether that last is a good or bad thing on balance), but there's very little validity in claiming that the dynamics which have benefitted them are artificially imposed.
I agree that networks will continue to benefit as more users hop on the platform. What I mean is that the element of network effects that we consider prohibitive/oppressive -- the "walls" around the "garden" -- are artificial in cyberspace, whereas they are real in meatspace.
There is nothing in cyberspace to prevent that data from flowing freely; there is only the threat that meatspace thugs will come and take your liberty and property for failing to respect the imaginary lines. In effect, it's a political border.
Without the legal armaments at its disposal, Facebook could still be a central hub of activity, but the data could be freed from it and exported.
Instead of creating Google+ and hoping it caught on, Google, seeing Facebook's success, could get credentials from the user and automatically multiplex/multicast the user's streams from G+ and FB into the G+ interface. The user would be using G+ as an FB browsing device, and that should be legal -- just as legal as using any other software as a browsing device.
Yes, the browser could materially modify the content of the page, including stripping the ads off the child stream. But all browsers can do that. Should we make it illegal for Chrome or Firefox as well? The only difference is that Firefox is executed on a box a few feet away from the user, whereas a G+ browser is executed on a box that is (probably) much further away.
In this scenario, Facebook continues to directly benefit from the growth and expansion of its network, and more people hop on Facebook. The difference is that there is no barrier to get up against if you're viewing the network's growth from across the room, and you can tell people on your side of the room "It looks Alice from that other network is brushing her teeth". Facebook would no longer have a monopoly on the content generated by users who are "in their space".
Standards, access, frictions, legal obstacles, implementation costs, and much more.
How, precisely, do you distinguish "artificial" and "non-artificial" barriers?
There were open networks, with Usenet being a particular example. Usenet still exists, sort-of. It's entirely a non-starter in social networks. You might want to enquire as to why. Similarly, Diaspora, Friendica, FOAF, blog+RSS, etc., etc.
>How, precisely, do you distinguish "artificial" and "non-artificial" barriers?
An artificial barrier is something that constrains by fiat, especially when that barrier comes from a third-party like the government. It's "because I said so".
You're correct that things like standards, access, and costs are barriers that must be overcome, but with a relatively small amount of effort, these barriers are surmountable.
The ongoing cat and mouse game between something like Facebook and something that multiplexed its data on the user's behalf would be the most expensive/irritating "natural" barrier; natural because, while Facebook would be intentionally creating it, it's a real capability restriction that must be circumvented technologically and not the government saying "Don't do that, or else".
A natural barrier that may constrain some otherwise illegal activities would be the disdain of the public. In this case, there is no such disdain; copyright and IP law long ago exited the space that most people consider reasonable.
>There were open networks, with Usenet being a particular example.
Fixing the law would make the data open without requiring any material change in FB. They don't have to open up. The point is that in cyberspace, the data is natively open.
As Bruce Schneier says, "trying to make digital bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet". Easy copying is an intrinsic, inextricable mechanism of the medium. Indeed, it's the fundamental mechanism that allows computers to function at all.
Blog+RSS did extremely well. Facebook and Twitter succeeded because they were simple forms of aggregation. Throughout the 00s, before FB took off with the adult crowd, many people had personal/family blogs to share information about their lives with families and friends, and you'd add them to your feed reader to keep up. FB has supplanted that by having greater usability, but at the core, the concept is the same. The difference now is that FB can lock it up due to the favorable legal situation.
As for things like Diaspora, though I admittedly haven't studied them thoroughly and they probably suffered significant real flaws, they're hamstrung by the artificial effects discussed here.
Diaspora likely would've been an acceptable "social interface" if it could multiplex streams from Facebook and multicast out both to its own network and Facebook (and for all I know, there probably is software that allows this to happen on open protocols like Diaspora; it just can't be deployed in a usable way by anyone looking not to get sued out of existence).
True there are barriers like technology and cost to overcome, but the one intractable barrier is the one that is totally arbitrary: the laws that prevent it.
Anyway, I know that we don't agree, but I do appreciate your contributions to this thread. The discussions have been interesting and given me some good feedback on how to phrase this moving forward.
I think we're at about the limits of an HN discussion length here. I appreciate your thoughts, though I also think you're severely understimating the emergent properties which can lead to lock-in effects. That's not to say there aren't some imposed barriers, though I'd argue ultimately those legal bars themselves are in some sense emergent (virtually any empowered agent will seek to reinforce its power through available means).
The good news, if there is that, is that aspirational social networks tend to follow cycles, both online and off, and Facebook will all but certainly fall, eventually. The bad news is that the same dynamics which created it will create the next instance, and I'm really not sure those dyanamics can be disrupted, no matter how much I'd like to see that they are.
While it's hard to make digital information uncopyable, it's relatively easy to make it nonsensical. Obsolete or opaque formats, hoop-jumping, rate-limiting, and more, all impose costs. And the larger your population is, by definition, the less sophisticated it is (sophistication is a definitionally minority characteristic). So the harder it is to manifest a shift.
Something to keep in mind: any time someone pitches an idea to you with the line "all we've got to do is convince people to ...", run. Just run. Unless people would sell their children and mothers to get what it is you're selling, it won't fly.
Very cool. I think Tilly-Odlyzko did hint at cost interactions as well in their reference to spam. Curious why you agree with T-O in the nlog(n) valuation of networks, but judge that costs still grow quadratically? Surely not all negative interactions are equally negative to all members of a network? (an online bully doesn't bully everyone equally, etc.)
I've been kicking around the question of what the proper functional specification of the network cost function is. One rationalisation is that by specifying an absolute minimum cost function, you can set an upper bound on the size of the network.
The rationale for a constant cost function imposed, per node, on all nodes, is that simply by existing any node imposes some cost on others. This becomes a simple random probability function: there's some random probability in any given cycle that one node will interact in a negative way with any other.
A key realisation is that that negative interaction can literally be anything -- it's a lot easier to get things wrong than right. So odds are that any interaction with any other node is going to impose a cost.
Tossing this into a more concrete realm, I've been doing a lot of thinking on communications and media networks, and the rivalousness of attention. (On which there's a fairly interesting history I'm just starting to scratch, going back to Herbert Simon and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, as well as before.) In the realm of "fake news" or cognates (propaganda, misdirection, misinformation, distraction, etc.), there's a question of how much news can the typical person process in a period? Say, a day, week, month, year, etc.
Most media publications have a top-10 story listing. I've found lists of the top-20 real and fake news stories posted around Facebook, and the drop-off in re-shares is 1-2 orders of magnitude from the top to bottom of the list. Discussions of "the big lie" (see Hitler and Goebbels, Nazi Germany) make clear that a small number of key points is key. Major news providers (WashPo, NYTimes, WSJ) produce ~150 - 300 original items daily. Newswire services (Reuters, AP, the French one (Presse ???) kick out about 2500 - 5000 pieces daily. Online media consumption (FB, mostly) is about 40-45 minutes daily, which you can divide amongst however many messages are processed (10? 100? -- that's 4 minutes, or 25 seconds, per message). Super-email consumers (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) manage about 150-300 messages/day. The NY Times comment moderation team handles somewhat short of 800 comments/day, presumably over some fraction of an 8-hour workday. Attention per message is time divided by messages.
Which means that every message we see, regardless of quality, imposes some acquisition cost. And if we're on a network that streams and dumps messages at us without any filtering capability, then ... we're going to be overwhelmed.
And that's a minimum cost.
The network which retransmits the fewest bullshit, bogus, false, irrelevant, etc., messages, has the highest intrinsic attention value.
Now, on top of this, there are other costs, for which some variant of nlog(n) metrics probably apply: there is a small subset of sources whose content is actively malicious. The ability and capacity to filter against* that ... is useful. And this shows up in all sorts of contexts -- small portions of any population are the overwhelming sources of crime, disruption, corruption, etc., etc. The key problems are 1) identifying them and 2) doing something effective to limit their capacity to do harm.
(There are almost certainly second order and higher effects as well, that's ... another discussion.)
A few more examples of cost functions:
1. In workgroups, inter-member communications, coordination, resource conflict, management time, meeting time, etc., all impose costs. See Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month.
2. In cities, any number of problems arise from putting people in close proximity: noise, smells, disease, congestion, etc. By the 19th century, London, as an example, was killing off its inhabitants faster than they could breed. The only way to sustain (or grow) its population was by net in-migration from the countryside. I believe life expectency once moving to the city was on the order of 16 years. Installing a sewerage system (1850s) and freshwater supplies (roughly the same time) vastly improved on that. New York City saw similar problems for which there's a Department of Public Health graphic showing net mortality from about 1800 through ~2005. The biggest declines were 1850 - 1910. Everything since has been at best modest.
3. Email. Classic instance of message-acquisition conflicts, but also of a failure to standardise on conventions and message formats. I find the medium all-but-unusable presently. And that's before considering the absolute lack of security or authentication involved.
4. Computers. If nothing else, heat accumulation limits the density and scale of systems.
5. Mammals. From the smallest (a ~0.5g shrew) to largest (200+ tonne blue whale) there's a tremendous range of scale, and superlinear net scaling. But dumping heat becomes a problem. Ounce-for-ounce, the shrew has a far higher metabolism than the whale, but a whale's total metabolism is far higher -- on the order of a tractor-trailer rig. There've been some recent discoveries of odd organ-like features withing the whale mouth, including a tremendous vascularisation of the tongue. I suspect that may be a means of ridding excess body heat particularly during feeding activities, which are tremendously energy-intensive: ram-filling the mouth with water, then straining it out, for krill-feeders. The entire underside of the mouth baloons out massively during this process.
My theory is that in any dendritic or network structure, you can identify similar value and cost functions, though you might have to think for a while before turning them up. One of the more interesting questions for me is knowledge-as-network itself: the ability to come up with more individual models, and more complex models, creates value (better modeling, understanding, prediction, and control of reality), but, if my theory is correct, also imposes some costs. Transfer, maintenance, utilisation, and variances on the abilities of individuals (or AI systems?) on acquiring, utilising, and adapting those models may be part of that.
> I've seen no indication he doesn't think it's correct.
He explicitly told us this during a lecture. It was something to the effect of "I just made it up, it's an oversimplification, but it's good marketing."
I think you are right that there are necessarily network effects online as well. But who benefits from these network effects to what degree, and how stable any central control over that network can be is very much determined by laws that could be entirely different.
Network effects necessarily exist, but walled gardens don't.
So, yes, value creation and value distribution are two different coins.
Centrality-of-control ... somewhat depends.
Danah Boyd in a Medium piece pointed out that Google's central-point-of-control of Gmail:
"Many who think about technology recognize the battle that emerged between spammers and companies over email, and the various interventions that emerged to try to combat spam. (Disturbingly for most decentralization advocates, centralization of email by Google was probably more effective than almost any other intervention.)"
Though thinking a bit on this gives some indication of how and why, and by extension, what could be done to break this control point:
1. Gmail receives a tremendous amount of mail. It can recognise both repetitive content and patterns of behaviour, particularly by points-of-origin.
2. Gmail can standardise internally on forms of reporting and mitigation against spam. That is, it is its own standards-development organisation. Increasingly, I'm noting that one of the efforts of a would-be monopolist is to attack standards formation. Because standards lower the barriers of entry for other participants.
3. Google specialise in contextual analysis -- the mining of content, particularly (but not just) textual content -- for indicators. The same analysis which makes for improved ads targeting or SERP relevance features heavily in detecting and thwarting spam, phishing, and related antisocial behaviour.
4. Tightly integrated communications. Between formats, pipe-bandwidth (intra- and inter-datacenter), and processing, Gmail can respond rapidly to new threats.
In particular, Gmail has a "report spam" feature (as do many other mail service providers) which allows for rapid detection of what users consider spam. Where you won't find similar features is on any third-party email tools.
Take an extreme case: Yahoo. I've long had problems with spam originating or transiting Yahoo's server space. What I've found is that whist Yahoo have a standardised reporting tool, they have not provided any support, nor are there any third-party tools of which I am aware for reporting spam in that format to Yahoo.
Running mutt, it would be trivial for me to pipe any given email, headers and all, into a report-generating application. Hell, I could dump spam to a dedicated mailbox, and run shell tools on that to handle 100s to millions of messages. I've built and used tools to do just that, back in the day.
But ... Yahoo never did this. Nor have any of the other major email service providers.
(I was approached at a spam conference by several people at email service providers who'd told me they'd written programs to read and parse the mail my programs were generating, which was ... amusing and heartening.)
There are dynamics which tend toward and reinforce walled gardens. Busting those is ... hard.
I still fundamentally think advertising is slime, a form of mind control, and a symptom of excess consumption in society, but that's not changing anytime soon. In the meantime, I'd be very happy if everyone were like The Deck.
Whenever I noticed that a site I'm visiting is "powered" by DECK, I was whitelisting it in the adblock. I hate ads, but I totally get that they keep things going in the Net, and so if there have to be ads they should be like the DECK: no tracking, no profiling, no being invasive. It's really a shame that an opposite of that triumphs today. In the long term it's gonna be painful for the users, for publishers, for the net, for advertisers as well. Probably for everyone, except for Facebook and Apple.
They - and Carbon Ads (mentioned below) to a lesser extent - had ads which were actually interesting to me. In a way computer-chosen ads (Google Adwords) never seem to be.
The fact there was no tracking so the same ad didn't follow me around, and wasn't tailored due to my web browsing history made them far more interesting, because they exposed me to new services.
That (for me) is the major annoyance of retargeting in particular. Just because I've looked at something once I'm shown ads; they can't determine whether I looked at it or I'm interested in it.
Computer generated ads (and recommendations in general) are always lame, everywhere: more of what you already like. I really want to explore new things, from the things I already like, well I do already have some of it, so just sth. else that scrolls by.
Tangentially (maybe), the only ads I clicked were the Deck ads and affiliate links in writing that I read. If the rest of the ads that I see are returning profits to the ad-host and ad-network, those profits are fake, as I not only no click them at all (well if not accidentally, and I've clicked, voluntarily, five-six such ads in my 20-odd years of life) the effect is negative, it's a -5 for the ad publisher and the ad host for me. But with Deck, if a website has (had?) Deck ads on it, it was +5 for both. So sad that this sort of value-adding service is going offline.
I'm curious what you think of my ad network[1] -- it allows for native ads that are non-intrusive and actually benefit the user. When you hover over an item in an image, an ad is displayed, but hovering off of it makes it go away.
That's neat, though looking at your demo (thru pleenq.com), the discoverability is not that good: I'd not hover things with my cursor if I didn't know that those popups would appear. You should tell that to the user somehow on the ad host.
I'm curious.... is there some sort of crazy image recognition tech going on here or does the website owner need to somehow identify what's in the image for the ads to work? If it's the former then this is seriously impressive.
Unfortunately (in terms of programming credibility), it's done manually. The process is extremely fast though -- just seconds to do a highlight, and a built-in search that hooks into all affiliate networks (Commission Junction, Linkshare, Affiliate Window, Share-a-sale, etc.) along with allowing custom links.
Huh, the startups who tried to do this before you (and died) didn't do it manually. Some crowdsourced it, some did recognition. Do you think your timing is better?
We're very much alive! Thriving, even. And yes, we merged AdPacks, Yoggrt, Fusion, and Carbon into just Carbon. Been growing the network ~20-30% or so year over year. The simplicity of the model still works well.
Where we deviated from The Deck's model is that we made some changes a few years ago that are working quite well. On the advertiser side we started selling on a cost per thousand impression basis vs a fixed monthly price per "slot". And on the publisher side we started paying them a dynamic rate based on traffic and performance of the ads vs. a fixed monthly amount. Hope that doesn't come across the wrong way - just a fundamental difference that I believe is one of the reasons why an otherwise incredibly similar business can work well for one, but not for the other.
I believe most businesses have to naturally change and adapt as time goes on. 10 years is a long time, and I expect our model will have to continue to evolve and change to make it another 10 years.
I really liked the deck - it was one of the few ad networks I actually wanted to get on my site. They had both really high quality ads, and really high quality publishers.
This is also a pretty big blow to the publishers - they'll feel the revenue loss, and there isn't an equivalent network to take their place. I'm sure they'll find something though.
Shame to hear this... although I guess there is less demand now with hyper-targeted invasive social ads. Working with The Deck previously, Jim was always such a pleasure to deal with and it felt a lot more personal as a network vs. Google or the big social networks. RIP.
> In 2014, display advertisers started concentrating on large, walled, social networks. The indie “blogosphere” was disappearing. Mobile impressions, which produce significantly fewer clicks and engagements, began to really dominate the market
There was a recent discussion on HN about how difficult it is to promote a blog now (compared to a few years ago). I think this statement by Deck further emphasises the fact that independent blogs are seeing a decline in readership.
This is sad. I based my idea for a free software friendly ad network on this, and pitched it back in 2009. It became AdBard, and for a while it was quite popular in the free software space.
The sheer number of tools display networks have at their fingertips to try to unlock value from your visitor's eyeballs are astounding - RTB exchanges / re-targeting / user profiling / etc / etc.
And even with all of that most content producers can't make a living off of their cut.
I always loved the simplicity of The Deck, but their end was inevitable.
Yup. Reading their post, it appears they didn't want to play the contemporary adtech game because it felt scummy, so they became unprofitable and quit.
Publishers massively overvalue their inventory and don't understand how their million views are worth only buttons. Ad networks can't pay more because they don't get paid more from the advertisers. The key is that no one clicks on banners any more, so it really is a race to the bottom.
Carbon Ads has pretty solid CTR, ads perform, advertisers renew, etc. It's not all doom and gloom for online advertising when you respect users and work hard to combine quality advertisers and publishers.
CTR isn't the only KPI by which ads are sold. These days, publishers understand that ads still influence even if normal users don't actually click. When a purchase is preceded by an impression from my ad network, in some cases I can get credit for a portion of it.
I wonder how much their content providers moving over to platforms like Medium hurt their business? Aside from the fact so few people are clicking on traditional display ads anymore.
We really shouldn't be looking down on this business. They managed to outlive a TON of companies (10 years is great on the internet), and I'm sure provided livelihoods for a fair number of people both at Coudal and their partner blogs who they were monetizing. Kudos to them!
It seemed like a straight-forward business with little overhead considering there wasn't anything invasive or highly technical about the advertising units.
Is there a market for that type of advertising online?
There is no shortsightedness involved, it's just a false positive from one of the filter lists. When false positives are reported, they get fixed. This fixes the false positive:
Could anyone in the know comment on whether their invite-only nature contributed to this? I have wanted to have Deck Network ads on my sites forever, but there was no real way to do so. They seemed to be restricted to inviting only Apple-themed blogs and sites, plus maybe their peripheral network.
I wonder if having a somewhat more clear and easy vetting process would have helped expand their reach somewhat.
Anyone have recommendations for video ad providers? I would like to embed ads to play before a stream starts, but would also like to do it in the most ethical way possible.
Was The Deck still invite only and if so can someone explain the value in that? That elitism could be a selling point, but if you are charging monthly, it just seems a turn off for expansion because they won't grow with you but only come in when you are established.
It's worth noting because this was an ad network that tried to do the job the right way. The heyday of the indie blog was already over, this is just a reflection of that. It worked for a while, and the wold has moved on. It's not a matter of "grinding it out" or persistence, the market factors have simply changed.
I wonder what Daring Fireball (AFAIK by far the site with largest readership on the Deck) will do. I'm sure that's still quite a profitable enterprise, to be clear.
The Deck was just one leg among several on the DF revenue stool. Weekly sponsorships for the RSS feed and my podcast are still going strong. And, Jim Coudal was open about the problems The Deck was facing -- the end didn't come as a surprise to member sites.
Not quite the same thing, but it is sort of heartening that Marco Arment -- of Tumblr, Instapaper, and now Overcast fame -- was able to build out his own non-scummy ad buying platform for his Overcast app. It seems to be doing quite well.
I know one person who ran a listing so far and they are very happy. It's about putting the right sort of "ad" in the right place. Advertising podcasts in an ad where people are listening to podcasts is a no-brainer and engagement should be high.
Advertising arbitrary services, even if they're good, on arbitrary blogs seems trickier to price and sell. But with the quality of the sites in the network, I'm sure they could all individually find the right, complementary type of advertising to continue to fund them.
What makes podcast ads so much better? I'm not referring to overcast ads.
I think the only thing I've ever bought based on a podcast ad is BackBlaze, but I do find podcast ads for the podcasts I listen to much better, more relevant, etc., I've just never been in the market for most of what they are selling.
Yev from Backblaze here -> thanks for purchasing! I think part of that is when I find places to run a Backblaze ad, I try to find a show-host who is willing to do the read themselves, try the product, and maybe share a personal story instead of just reading blanket copy. That doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it comes off better. Backblaze is a tough thing to market because a lot of folks view backup as a horrendous time-sink - so if the host can drive home the ease-of-use we see folks more inclined to giving our trial a spin!
The way most of them are delivered makes them more like native advertising. As long as a percentage of listeners engage, it has value, and that percentage is higher than engagement via sidebar ads on the Web it seems.
There's also a certain remaining level of novelity in podcast advertising that helps it command a premium, although I suspect this is beginning to diminish.
Gruber already appears to do some inventory management himself (see the occasional posts about unbooked RSS sponsorship opportunities), so I assume he'll just have to take on the rest of it. He probably has enough relationships with advertisers for now that he won't have to start hustling yet, but I'd imagine he'll eventually want to work with a contractor to sell spots.
Yeah, that's true. As far as I know he also did the ad management for his podcast himself, so maybe he can just do that for display ads too. Makes sense.
Like it or not, there are real advantages to walled gardens like facebook. To ad buyers, it's a single platform where one can target the entire world person-by-person -- even across multiple devices (iPad, phone, laptop), with hyper-accurate segmentation and user tracking, strong identity services with all the abuse/spam prevention and payment capability that enables, multi-lingual, optimized CDN-based distribution to ensure all content is fast and cheaply delivered to every corner of the globe (an especially big deal given the rise of video ads), mobile-first UX that works across every conceivable handset including iOS and every esoteric variant of Android, etc.
I'm not pleased about a lot of this, but it's a mistake to deny what's happening.