Welcome to the 90s, when advertising on the web was not profitable. ;)
I totally agree with what is wrong with advertising on the web, which is basically everything, but there is also value to impressions.
Let's say a new movie is coming out. I don't care if you go to the movie website, I just want to get the actors' faces in front of you with a movie name.
Same goes for a political candidate. I don't need you to go to Bernie Sanders' website, I just need you to know that he's running and a couple of things that he stands for.
The problem is that advertising and tracking are inherently connected today. Want to target ads to people who are likely to respond to them? You need profiles on all those users. Want privacy? You need to starve the collection of your data to build profiles.
IMO this is precisely why Google still gives me better results than DuckDuckGo - not _only_ do they sometimes know who I am and things about me, but their data set is based on knowing so much about all of us.
I also find that supremely unsettling.
Having worked on ad-driven properties, I'll say it's pretty common to track things at both ends. The advertiser always wants the impressions / click-throughs / whatever to be as low as possible, and the operators of the site want it to be higher. Much negotiation ensues.
Also, most folks don't have direct ad sales, though this is the holy grail in ad-driven properties, most sites use doubleclick and a suite of others, and often an intermediary inventory management service which picks the ads which pay the most for a given hour or day and maybe switch out providers based on their speed (doubleclick also gets really slow at busy times and will cause your site not to load :/)
1 - that transfers all risk from the advertiser to the publisher. Did the advertiser's creative not perform? Bad targeting? It's now the pub's problem.
2 - brand advertising isn't really meant to create clicks, but rather a positive impression of a brand. eg those cute cheerios ads or the xmas polar bear coke ads.
You're assuming the point of all display ads is to make you click. Many advertisers don't care whether you click or not, they just want to make sure you saw the ad/message. Many brands don't require online engagement, they want to reinforce what their brands means.
I totally agree with what is wrong with advertising on the web, which is basically everything, but there is also value to impressions.
Let's say a new movie is coming out. I don't care if you go to the movie website, I just want to get the actors' faces in front of you with a movie name.
Same goes for a political candidate. I don't need you to go to Bernie Sanders' website, I just need you to know that he's running and a couple of things that he stands for.
The problem is that advertising and tracking are inherently connected today. Want to target ads to people who are likely to respond to them? You need profiles on all those users. Want privacy? You need to starve the collection of your data to build profiles.
IMO this is precisely why Google still gives me better results than DuckDuckGo - not _only_ do they sometimes know who I am and things about me, but their data set is based on knowing so much about all of us.
I also find that supremely unsettling.
Having worked on ad-driven properties, I'll say it's pretty common to track things at both ends. The advertiser always wants the impressions / click-throughs / whatever to be as low as possible, and the operators of the site want it to be higher. Much negotiation ensues.
Also, most folks don't have direct ad sales, though this is the holy grail in ad-driven properties, most sites use doubleclick and a suite of others, and often an intermediary inventory management service which picks the ads which pay the most for a given hour or day and maybe switch out providers based on their speed (doubleclick also gets really slow at busy times and will cause your site not to load :/)