[tboyd47]

It would still be ads, but much nicer ones that come out of direct negotiation between publishers and advertisers, instead of some shady clickbait ad agency randomly selected to invade your site by Google's algorithms.

My experience has been that direct-sold ads produce more revenue for publishers than programmatic ads. I would love to see research on this one day.

[TheCoreh]

> My experience has been that direct-sold ads produce more revenue for publishers than programmatic ads

Yes, but do they provide an equally good ROI for advertisers? (And the same level of granularity, tracking and reach as something like Google Adwords?) That's the real issue at play.

[tboyd47]

If price is any measure of value, yes.

[lm_nop]

"Premium" sites (like the ones with engineering resources to build to AMP spec) e.g. NYTimes, WA Post, WSJ, are not really prime concern - they can afford to move to AMP and do whatever kind of ad sales they want (direct/programmatic).

It's the smaller websites (Bob's Blog) who can't afford eng resources to build to AMP, and to build fast ads, who are "suffering" a loss of search results prioritistion. (These smaller sites may turn to shady ad networks, and suffer further with shitty ad payload, further lowering search preferences if based on page load).

Does that mean smaller websites are stifled? Not sure...

[evv]

> much nicer [ads] that come out of direct negotiation between publishers and advertisers

Uh, usually this results in "native advertising", which is advertising pretending to be real articles. This is much more dangerous and insidious in my opinion than an explicit 'sponsored' box with an ad inside.

If this continues, successful publishers will be the ones that push the most profitable corporate propaganda, rather than the ones that effectively inform the public.

[tboyd47]

You're still thinking in terms of programmatic ad marketplaces.

I've actually done native advertising and even something as simple as adding a company's logo to an online catalog can pull in $100,000s in ad revenue. You don't need DFP for that, and it's undetectable by ad blockers because it's just an image.

We need to get out of this concept of thinking of advertising as just publishers selling blank squares of "real estate" on their site, and back to the sort of partnership model that existed in print media. A publisher specializes in reaching a certain audience with certain interests; the right advertiser will pay more to reach that audience. You don't need to track individuals to do that or build profiles on them.

Digital advertising made a new pricing model possible: CPM. But just because you have a new way of doing something doesn't mean it's the best way.