Actually, what would be the economics of this? Would Sun-Times get more revenue doing it themselves, rather than going through a broker? Would it pay enough to cover all the staff they’d have to hire and other resources? Would it be more profitable than the current wicked scheme of things?
Probably not, I think. This kind of stuff requires large-scale operations with nano-thin profit margins. One individual web-serving company like Sun-Times or any other similar probably couldn’t do it. Unless, of course, they went all-in and became a big ad broker like the others.
Thanks for updating us, Ed. Seems like you guys are stuck between a rock and a hard place as far as balancing the need for sufficient revenue and the potential for hurting the site’s users, and it sounds like you’re doing pretty much everything reasonably possible to keep things running and keep us happy.
Could you clarify what “house ads” and “Sun-Times house ads” means? Is it actually referring to some kind of real-estate ads for houses, or does it mean something else?
“House ads” means ads for the publishing organ, as they say, itself.
I don’t know about the financial arrangement of different media houses, but in my magazine they were routinely placed when page layout for the editorial was coming up short, or just screwy, and they put in an ad for the magazine or its services to fill up patches of the page.
“House ad” is an old newspaper term. It means an ad we run on behalf of the house, i.e., ourselves. You’ll see promotions for Sun-Times publications and ventures we’re involved with.
The Sun-Times has a sales force, which direct sells as much of the company’s online ad inventory as it can. TSD is a difficult sell because the audience, while large, is spread around the world. However, even when pushing advertising on suntimes.com, which is much more local, it’s virtually unheard of to “sell through” all the available slots. The remaining (or “remnant”) inventory is turned over to brokers to monetize as best they can.
I would love to direct sell more ads, and am working on a scheme to do this. (In addition to more control, we’d get a much better rate.) But we’ll be dealing with brokered ads for the foreseeable future.
We beef. Sun-Times Media is a good sized company, and we can get our ad provider’s director of engineering and people like that to the table. They listen to us and come up with reasonable ideas to prevent a recurrence. But they say, and this has the ring of truth, that there’s an “arms race” between the bad guys and the ad gatekeepers. Even if ad certification were implemented I’m sure somebody would figure out a way to hack it. So I don’t kid myself this problem can be completely eliminated.
Newspaper ads have a high degree of latency. If you see an ad, turn the page, pause, then go back the ad magically appears in the same space. Not so on the internet. I would think that if you’re concerned about building a brand (as opposed to pitching clickbait, a valid but different business model) then latency would be something that you would like. It need not be expensive in terms of bandwidth either, given browser caching.
I don’t know why the sponsorship model isn’t used more.
What would a sponsored banner ad cost? For many years we have had posters asking if there was a way to donate money to the cause. A sponsored/direct ad would be the perfect way to do that. People could pay for an ad that could say “the space brought to you by Measure for Measure” or a link to their favorite cause or anything else (within reason).
Third party ad buying is another non-existent business model that puzzles me. Talking Points Memo, Vox, the Daily Caller, Redstate, and an assortment of other bloggers have an enthusiastic user base. Why isn’t there the online variant of the Ad Council? You could donate $x to the non-profit which would place an ad at Redstate or the SDMB badgering the reader to wear a seat belt or donate to Amnesty International. There is the Liberal Blog Ad Network, but it’s not set up for third party donations. I concede that this idea would have to be reviewed by tax lawyers.
Wait, is that seriously how y’all are trying to spin this? That you had some problems with them a few weeks ago, rather than had some problems with them all along, but that only finally got you nailed a few weeks ago by Google?
In other words, the only thing left to rely on is trust of the ad broker – something that we’ve seen no one should have with the one you’re doing business with, and yet here you go, ready to turn them back on again.
FWIW, I’ve seen online comics, reputable game mod sites (the Nexus sites for Bethesda games) and an online dictionary for Tolkien languages blacklisted by google.
Also, Deadline Hollywood, a large and reputable entertainment news site, was flagged by Google a few months back. This isn’t something which affects just some sites. Any website running ads could find itself flagged, it’s the nature of the beast until ad companies find some way of resolving this.
AClockworkMelon, the simplest hypothesis would be that you spend much more time here than on most other sites, and so would be more likely to notice a problem here.
We’ve conferred with our ad provider and agreed to resume serving ads from the most trusted subset of sources. This will likely start this afternoon. If no problems surface after a week we’ll gradually add sources. A cap (currently 15) will be set on the number of ads shown to any one user within a 24-hour period; after that public service announcements, house ads, or ads from in-house accounts will be shown.
To make it easier for us to monitor the situation, I’m closing this thread and will open another one for problem reports only. Thanks for your cooperation.
