You’re blaming the wrong people

The shit-ness of web/mobile ads is not caused by who y’all blame

So, once again, it’s that time of year to rail against the eeeeevil of online advertising. Which, to be fair, is a moldy pile of shit. Well, it’s more mobile than that. It’s really more like some kind of Ur Neo-Otyugh.

But when you read the pieces, you see three common targets, and really, none of them are to blame in terms of source.

Is It The Fault of the Websites? Noooooooo…

First, there’s the websites. The current flavor of the month in the Apple space is iMore.com. Renee Ritchie’s response is here.

Setting aside Gruber’s dripping condescension and evidently complete lack of understanding that not every web site can or should be DF or The Loop, when you’re a company like Mobile Nations or anyone else that consists more of one lone “raconteur” and has to do things like pay writers, designers, and tech people, you’re fucked. Why?

Well, for one, unlike newspapers or non-internet radio/TV, for a web site, success can kill you just as much as failure. Bandwidth is not free, and at scale, doesn’t even resemble cheap. You want to have all that dynamic goodness? That’s more network accesses. That’s bandwidth and storage, and no one is giving that away, especially not at the scale that an iMore needs.

That’s real-assed money. At one point, my old site, which was never that popular was costing me around $250 a month in bandwidth. Had it been much more popular, I’d have had to either sell ads or shut it down. Success, on the web, is more expensive than failure. So how the fuck do you pay for this? Well, you can try to get people to pay for the content directly, via various takes on subscriptions and micropayments. You know, that crap people will constantly tell you they’d happily pay for if it means no ads.

Hold on, I’m laughing too hard to type.

Okay, better. This is just some bullshit. If that line of crap even resembled reality, we wouldn’t need so many goddamned ads to pay for shit. Seriously, if all it took to meet overhead and salary for iMore was a subscription, do you not think Renee et al would have had that crap running from the start? As Renee says:

Subscriptions and memberships haven’t historically worked for sites our size. Most people simply don’t see the value in paying for content. We’re all too used to getting everything “for free”.

Hell, even the New York Times is not having wild success with subscriptions. So if you have a web site that needs money to survive, you have two choices, sponsors or ads. Both are a deal with the devil, and sponsors tend to be very…twitchy, and getting enough of them unless you’re literally a Daring Fireball or a Loop Insight, who can charge the steep-assed rates they charge and actually get people to pay it, that’s not going to work. By the way, when I say steep, I mean steep.

So you’re stuck with ads. By ads, I mean the real world of Ads, not that elitist “we only pick people we like” Deck shit. That’s such a blogerati circle jerk that you’d have to be a fool or one of The Chosen to even consider it.

Which means you have to sign up for ad networks, and now it’s a crapshoot of quality. You have some control, but not much. As Renee says:

We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.

And note, iMore is actually trying to sell premium ads. (You know, if Gruber and the rest of the “Decknorati” are so fucking concerned about helping iMore, I know a great way. HINT)

It’s a Morton’s fork, and both tines are barbed, oozing acid. But that’s what you’re stuck with if you’re an iMore.

Is it the fault of the Ad Agencies? Nooooo…

Well, what about the Ad agencies? Surely its those souless Mad Men Bastards doing this!

Yeah, no. So I spent over six years working for an ad agency, and you know who hates shitty ads and flash ads and popovers/unders more than them?

NO ONE

Because they have to make those ads, and create those ads, and use those ads in hideously complicated setups. Which means they have to test the functionality. Over and over. There’s a reason you can drink at your desk in an agency. (If you ban booze, they just go to heroin.)

Agencies get paid to help clients sell stuff. The Clients do not want to spend a lot of money on online ads. (If you don’t/used to work for an agency, you have no idea how cheap those bastards are.) Agencies actually employ some really creative people who would love to create beautiful ads that didn’t cock up your browser, burn your battery and piss on your data plan.

But that takes time, and costs money, neither of which the client wants to spend. Also, agencies don’t run the ad networks, they simply use them, and those fuckers get paid. Don’t ever be late paying your Google or Facebook ad bill. <shiver>.

In addition, clients long ago realized that online ads have something that neither print/radio/TV have. Data. Gobs of it. You want to know why ads and ad networks collect more and more data every day? Because the people funding this industry (The Clients) want to know which sites give them the best rate of return, and unlike newspaper or radio or tv, where you can’t really tell who, if anyone heard your ad until some time after it runs, if ever, with online advertising, you know the second someone clicks. You know how long they stay on that page, how long they hovered over your ad, how long it took them to close that interstitial autoplaying obscenity inflicted on them.

They know all that and they want more. Way more.

Ponder this: if that kind of data collection didn’t pay, didn’t work, why would anyone do it? It’s not easy, in fact, it’s hideously complex. Google is essentially a company devoted to doing that.

But here’s the thing: it works.

Those hideous ads? The nerds may hate them, but in the really real world, they work. I’ve seen the numbers. Fuck do they work. (Nerds have a real blind spot when it comes to remembering that they aren’t actually representative of the entire goddamned internet. It’s why the Wii sold so well, even though Nerds swore it would fail.) People click on that shit. Again, Google and Facebook. Ads work. Even the ones you hate. Maybe especially those.

Is it the fault of the Ad Networks? Nooooo…

Look, ponder for a moment the complexity of modern ad networks. The overhead, the resources, the bandwidth, the human capital, all of what it takes to keep a Google, or any of the other ad networks running.

If this shit didn’t really work, to the tune of billions a year, DO YOU REALLY THINK THEY’D SPEND THE MONEY TO KEEP DOING IT????

Right, no, they wouldn’t. They, like the agencies, are middlemen. They are not creating the problem. They’re just trying to make the bank they need to pay their people. You can argue they could do it differently, but that decision is ultimately not really theirs.

Is it the fault of the people paying for the ads and you, the consumer? Hmm, COULD BE!

At the end of the day, there are two groups that drive almost all of this, and bear the vaaaaast majority of the blame:

1. The people selling the shit in the ads
2. The people buying the shit in the ads

If neither of them were getting what they want out of it, then none of this would really exist. But they are, and in enough quantity to make all the spectacular badness of online ads worth it. It’s the MacKeepers and the silly tits who fall for those horrid ads that are the engine driving this mess. It’s Adobe, and Chevrolet, and Mack Weldon and OWC, and Barclay’s and all the other people paying for those ads. It’s you, me, and everyone else clicking on them.

Those are, if you must blame someone, the real causes.

So what can we do about it?

Honestly, without a change in behavior, not a fucking thing. People talk a good game, but the data shows, with vanishingly rare exception, they are not going to pay for their content. Not in the numbers or amounts needed to make online ads unncessary, or not so necessary that sites can afford to say “No, I’ll not have shit on my site, I don’t need you, you need me.”

Patreon works for some folks, but I don’t see any evidence that the Patreon model works for an iMore or larger. For a single person, it can work. Note, can. But would I want to manage a payroll with it? Fuck no.

“Find a new business model” people screamed. Well, the internet did. Too bad it’s the one you hate the most. But even as badly as it works, it works better than the rest. Renee and others don’t want to fuck up your reading. But what other option do they really have?