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by ocoster
3502 days ago
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What you are missing is that there is a cost associated with monetizing the full inventory with automation. You lose control over what is being shown, you are diluting your brand and you are at risk of alienating your users. At Stack Overflow we are not willing to make this trade off. |
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Automation costs are actually administrative costs (platform fees), which have recently increased via unmonetized opportunity cost models (opportunity being a specific technical term in advertising). SO is not fully or optimally monetizing, probably because they prefer to keep the old tech they are using and/or the staff that has been there since early days. It's also possible they want some dejour/nonstandard controls. Saying they are making an informed tradeoff is simply incorrect. Saying they are making a (unspecified) choice, then not really talking about that choice, is what the article skirts.
Sub 10k/mo for platforms at 2 billion opps per day is AOL and SpotX. That schedule doesn't matter at the volume SO works with. Fees and Opp costs are not the issue with the unmonetized inventory.