Tag: Publishing

My 2c about ad blockers

Yaron GalaiLeave a comment

I’m always surprised when smart people, especially those working in ad supported industries, advocate the use of ad blockers. When new folks join the Outbrain team, I ask them during their on-boarding how many of them use ad blockers. About 50% of people say they do, and are quite casual about it.

Then I ask them how many of them steal books at Barnes & Noble, and the response is usually a bunch of horrified faces at the mere suggestion. I’m not sure why. Both are very similar forms of stealing content without paying the content owner.

The idea that ad blockers are OK to use because ads are annoying or interruptive, is absolutely ridiculous. The ads aren’t some optional thing you choose to turn on or off – the ads are how you pay for the content you consume and enjoy.

The ads might be annoying, but so is the cashier at your bookstore. But you probably never told yourself: “I want these books and magazines, but that payment part is really annoying… It’s an interruption in my day to stand in line and take out my credit card. And the paying piece – that is really annoying! So I’ll just take all the books I wanted and walk out the store without the annoying part!”.

The form of payment for the content is determined by the seller, not the consumer. Barnes & Noble might set the price in dollars. A publisher might set the price in the form of advertising. If you don’t like the form of payment, or the price, the only recourse is to not consume that content.

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Publishing – the only metric that matters

Yaron Galai3 Comments

Publishers (and bloggers specifically) tend to measure their business on two parameters:

  1. Page views
  2. Ad revenues

These are fine metrics, but I believe that they are derivatives of a much more fundamental metric which, if ignored, could be devastating to a publisher’s business. Lets call this metric the “Reader’s Goodwill Pot”.

Lets assume an imaginary pot into which imaginary goodwill points can be deposited, and from which imaginary goodwill points can be depleted. Sort of like a bank account for goodwill. Now, as a publisher/blogger, imagine you are running this kind of ‘goodwill account’ with your audience of readers.

Piggy_bank
When you post great content you are adding points into the pot. When you provide your reader with a great user experience you are adding points to this pot.

If you build a big enough goodwill pot, with a big enough audience, then you can dip into that pot occasionally, take some points away and put them in your pocket. That is also usually known as advertising.

As a publisher, with every pixel you put on your site (or ink on paper, or frame on screen, etc), with every piece of content you produce, with every ad you take on your site – this is the single most important metric you should obsess over. Am I putting goodwill points into my piggy bank, or am I taking some away?

Great publishers understand that the need to keep this balance is far more important than the need to track any of the other metrics – PV’s and revenues, for example – in isolation.

As we hit a recession, I suspect many more bloggers and traditional publishers are going to ignore this metric and will try squeezing the lemon as much as possible by cutting on the content and the user experience, and at the same time trying to maximize the number of ads that interrupt the readers. Publishers ignoring the ‘Reader’s Goodwill Pot’ will not survive, not because of the bad macro economy, but rather because they failed to understand the micro economy of publishing.   

{Image CC by: Nieve44/La Luz . Thanks!}

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