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
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.
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.
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)
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)
The reason you see Interop over and over again is that this is a house ad - placed by UBM on a UBM site - in lieu of having any paid advertising.
We run house ads and banners too - free to us - for our conferences on sdtimes.com
Ted Bahr SD Times