Not here on the blog (well, not yet anyway). Let me explain.
The programming project I’m working on in my spare time has the possibility of drawing a large audience. If I draw a big enough audience to keep the project sustainable over time I’m going to need a way to monetize it. That will most likely come in everybody’s least favorite form of raising money – selling advertising on the space.
People have a love / hate relationship with advertising. Most people skip over commercials (if there are any) when they watch shows on their DVRs. Many people opt for streaming services that don’t have any commercials at all. There are many websites that have memberships and for a premium price, you can NOT see the advertising displayed to everyone else. Many people say they actively ignore the ads on webpages these days, although I believe they register in the viewers mind on at least a subconscious level.
I watch some cheesy movies that only show up on streaming services that force you to watch ads, just like broadcast TV used to do. You can’t fast forward through them. It drives the wife nuts. She’ll leave the room and go do something else rather than watch ads.
On the other hand, people LIKE to buy things. An old advertising adage says that people like to buy but they don’t like being sold. And how are they going to know if what they want to buy is even available if they don’t see ads for it? Yes, they can do searches, but the search engines are likely to display ads for products right along with search results.
Many people state they read reviews, either on the store’s website, or more likely on blog posts. Something like eighty percent (80%) of people report basing their buying decisions on reviews they read in blogs.
So, if I’m going to run ads on the web app I’m writing, I might as well figure out how to serve ads from the site. Yeah, I could go with Google Ads or some other service, and I might incorporate some of them in the web app, but the big drawback with that plan is the ad service gets the lion’s share of the money. If I’m going to make this thing sustainable, I’m going to need to get more of the money than some tech giant. The only way to do that is to host the ads on the site itself.
I think I have worked out a system for placing the ads. I need to be able to be able to say ‘place one, or more, ads in this location’. Then when someone looks at that section, the ads will show up. I’m trying to figure out how I can do this dynamically as well. If I am trying to get advertisers and I don’t have any for a certain section yet, I don’t want to have to rely on a hard-coded value on the page that I might have to change later. You never know when your ‘net connection will get hosed right in the middle of a file upload. I think I have a way of doing it but I’ll have to test it out in the code to see if it will work.
I’m also thinking I can run two different types of ads. Text only ads (like Google does) are easier to do and display. You write three lines of text and you’re done. And they can be sold at a lower price point, which might entice new advertisers to try the platform. Banner ads, the ones that are all graphical, take more to produce and can be at different sizes. At least there are industry standards for ad sizes so I won’t get ones that will destroy the overall layout of the page.
I’ll need some reporting so the folks advertising will be able to see how well (or not) their ads are doing. It’s easier to get people to renew their ads if you can show them that they are working and bringing in money. I’ve been told that if an ad costs one thousand dollars ($1000) to run, but every time it runs it brings in as little as one hundred dollars ($100) in profit consistently, that ad will run indefinitely. For those of you who are math averse and think only making $100 when you spend $1000 is losing money, note I said profit. That means you spend $1000, you make that $1000 back plus $100 in profit, every time the ad runs. You spend $1000, get $1100, minus what you spent and you end up with a extra $100. In actual numbers it looks like this:
$1100 (total income from the ad) – $1000 (your initial ad spending amount) = $100 (profit)
Anyway, this is what’s swimming around in my brain on the topic.
What do you think about online ads, my Hordeling? Love them, hate them, ignore them? Leave a comment and let me know.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum