Last year @CC_Mike wrote:
We realize that the addition of programmatic advertising over the past few years has provided needed revenue but also degraded our community experience.
To explain the situation, I’ll need to go into a bit of detail about two types advertising available to us:
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Traditional—Advertisers contract with CC directly to run their ads. For instance, UChicago pays for an ad that goes in the background of their category:
It requires us to have people to find opportunities, manage the relationships and implement the actual ad placements. On the plus side, ads are highly relevant and effective. It’s a good business to be in, if there are enough advertising partners to support all the people needed to make it work.
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Programmatic—Advertisers contract with a third party platform who finds an audience for their ads using an algorithm. Websites contract with the same third party to sell space for those ads to run. Whenever a visitor comes to the site, a bit of code contacts the ad platform which responds with an ad for the site to show. The ad platform charges each advertiser and pays the website based on which ads it showed.
The advantage of programmatic ads is that’s easy to get started with very little overhead. Just about anyone can have ads on their site without having to have a sales team or developers. There are several downsides, however. Since the advertiser and website are matched only when someone visits, there’s no guarantee the ad will match the content of the site. In theory, it will at least match the interests of the visitor, but in practice it’s hit-and-miss. Programmatic ads can also slow down the site.
With that background, you can see why we switched exclusively to traditional advertising last year. It’s potentially a better business, more effective for advertisers trying reach an interested audience and a better experience for visitors. We’re still actively pursuing traditional advertising.
Unfortunately, we don’t have enough advertisers to cover costs. Meanwhile we have a large number of pages that don’t have advertisements. So we’re going to try using programmatic ads to help cover our costs.
Based on past experience, we’re imposing some limits:
- No ads for unwanted products (politics, guns, tobacco, alcohol, etc.)
- No animated ads, including video
- No ads that cover content
- No noticeable decrease in page responsiveness
Given all the work done to stabilize the site in 2022-2023, the final point is especially important. If the site feels sluggish, it makes attracting new visitors that much harder. So that would be a self-defeating situation.
Here are mockups for the initial plan. First, the desktop:
And on mobile:
There are two ad placements:
- A banner on the top of the page which will scroll out of view as you read the page.
- A footer on the bottom of the page that will float down as you scroll.
Everyone will see the banner, but we’ll remove the footer for everyone who has a Trust Level greater than 1. We believe this will allow us to hit our revenue goals without harming the experience for visitors and members of CC.
I expect to see ads on the site within a week or two. (We are cleaning out a bunch of old code to make sure the site is ready for these ads and that can take a little time.) When they come and if you see problems, you can help by replying with:
- Your browser information.
- Your operating system.
- A screenshot, if possible.
- A copy of the link the ad, if possible. (This can usually be accomplished by right clicking on desktop or press-and-hold on a phone.)
- A short description of what’s wrong with the ad.
Thank you for your help in making CC a profitable site for all involved. 