[x0x0]

fwiw, you likely can't make real money with this.

The big drivers are (1) ever more increasing inventory (ie page loads/refreshes/whatever with ad slots). Relatively fixed demand plus increasing supply gives you a price fall that has been going on for 10+ years with no end in sight, combined with:

(2) retargeting has gotten endlessly more sophisticated allowing people whom advertisers wish to target to be found on places with cheap inventory.

You need immense numbers of pageviews or to be very high value to some specific audience. As an example of the latter, somewhat generically: imagine people really into high end watches. There are buyers for that. Or your site is valuable to eg vacation intenders.

It's why more and more sites (Defector, Talking Points Memo, 404, all major newspapers) that wish to, you know, not die are charging subscription revenue.

[amluto]

I wonder whether a high-quality site could gain value for its own ad inventory by trying to minimize the extent to which it leaks retargeting information.

[x0x0]

the nyt has largely done this afaik

the limiting factor is that you have to opt out of a lot of the ad industry. That means transaction costs are high. iow, you have to be super valuable and have a ton of traffic because buyers have to buy from your site by name and often by doing actual work to make the transaction happen.

So this strategy can work, but you need enough volume for it to be worthwhile for the buyers to overcome the cost of working with you. One of the big things exchanges and google offer ad buyers is a low friction experience which means low costs to place a lot of ads.

if you're unfamiliar with the ads, imagine either (1) plugging $50k into whatever demand side platform (dsp), such as google/criteo/the trade desk/adobe/etc and being done; vs hand selecting even 50 or more sites; working with their ad ops to get ads up and running; monitoring 50 different individual budgets, etc. It's just a lot of work on both sides.

[jrmg]

It does feel like a rubicon has been crossed recently, where most things I like are going behind paywalls, and many smaller outfits are heavily pushing Patreon or the like.

Anecdotally, I’m paying subscriptions for news sites (mainstream and niche) and podcasts I would not have had a few years ago. I subscribed to YouTube, which I thought I’d never do!

I’m not sure what to make of this. Microtransactions and subscriptions powering creators has been a dream of many people for a long, long time - at least since the 90s. So maybe this is great? But even if it is, something has been lost too.

[Dylan16807]

I'm still waiting for a more general way to replace ads with micropayments. YouTube premium works well but only for video. Subscribing to a dozen small websites/teams is not it; too much money per payment and 98% of sites get nothing from me.

[relaxing]

Hold up, that “wishing death upon others” revenue stream sounds like an interesting business model…