Month: February 2013

What Does “Native Advertising” Cost?

Felix Salmon points out that online ads are “easy to ignore, there’s nothing inherently interesting about them, and insofar as they grab your attention, they tend to do so in a very annoying way, by preventing you from reading or watching the thing you were looking for”:

Hence the rise of so-called native ads: things you want to read and look at and click on. There’s a certain amount of promise there, and the native-ad industry is certainly going to grow from its present size. But it’s tough: building these things is a huge amount of work for the advertiser, with no guaranteed payoff. And selling them is even more work for any publisher. And here’s the next big problem with selling online advertising, especially native advertising: it’s really expensive to do so. While online journalism is still cheap, online ad-sales staffers tend to cost a fortune, especially if they have a clue what they’re doing.

He goes on:

I was told this evening that Buzzfeed alone has no fewer than sixty ad-sales people, all of whom are out there, knocking on doors, taking potential clients out to lunch, and generating income one hard-won deal at a time. That doesn’t scale.

The Female Chatterbox Myth

Amanda Marcotte debunks it:

For every study showing women talk more, there’s another showing men talk more. After a while, it becomes difficult to deny that individual preference and environmental pressures have more influence than gender on how much talking people do. (For instance, I work at home and my partner works in an office. Odds are really high that he speaks many times more words than I do on a regular basis, because he has to.)

So why do people so readily believe women talk more? Part of the problem is that our prejudices distort our observations about reality. Consider that most Americans overestimate how much of the population is gay by a factor of 5 and overestimate how much of the population has illegally immigrated here by a factor of 6 or 7. They also overestimate what percentage of the population is on welfare.

Upgrading Our Vision, Ctd

[youtube http://youtu.be/V6Tsrg_EQMw ]

Joshua Topolsky played around with Google’s Glass:

Is it ready for everyone right now? Not really. Does the Glass team still have huge distance to cover in making the experience work just the way it should every time you use it? Definitely.

But I walked away convinced that this wasn’t just one of Google’s weird flights of fancy. The more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it. If the team had told me I could sign up to have my current glasses augmented with Glass technology, I would have put pen to paper (and money in their hands) right then and there. And it’s that kind of stuff that will make the difference between this being a niche device for geeks and a product that everyone wants to experience.

After a few hours with Glass, I’ve decided that the question is no longer ‘if,’ but ‘when?’

Recent Dish on Glass here.

The Idle Idea Factories

Barro largely blames Republican epistemic closure on the party’s think tanks:

Conservative think tanks haven’t developed plausible alternative ideas on health policy because that isn’t what donors want them to do. For the last four years, the project has been finding anything to tear down Obamacare, not to find a replacement. … When people talk about the conservative echo chamber, they often focus on lowbrow outlets like Fox News, talk radio and Breitbart.com. Certainly these are often embarrassing and counterproductive for conservatism, most recently with the “Friends of Hamas” fiasco. But every movement contains stupid people reading stupid things. The special reason conservatives can’t think straight is that their supposedly smart institutions are inside the echo chamber, too.

The Geography Of The Grocery Store

Gregory McNamee surveys it:

[T]he things we need the most—bread, milk, eggs, fresh vegetables, cheese, and meat—are located by design as far as they can be from the front door, forcing the shopper to navigate the entire store just as surely as if Saunders had laid out the path himself. The dairy section in particular is almost always at the farthest possible point away from the entrance. …

Why is it that the bakery is so often located by the snacks and the booze? And why is the bakery so often so far from the door? The scent of a fresh-baked cinnamon roll drifting across a big store is as good a draw as any to get customers into the coveted interior, and it can pull them all the way across the store. And as for the first question, there seems to be something inside our reptilian brains that connects sweets and snacks to alcohol. Just what that something is isn’t quite clear yet, but as far as grocery store placement is concerned, it works. Store designers therefore often link these items, adding prescription and over-the-counter medications to the mix in in states where groceries and pharmacies are allowed to share a roof. Baked goods, snacks, alcohol, and medicines are, of course, splendid profit centers, one more reason why mastermind grocers like to see them in one spot.

Guess Which Buzzfeed Piece Is An Ad, Ctd

Back in July, Chris Dixon passed along an email BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti sent to the company’s investors detailing their strategy:

We care about the experience of people who read BuzzFeed and we don’t try to trick them for short term gain. This approach is surprisingly rare.

How does this matter in practice? First of all, we don’t publish slideshows. Instead we publish scrollable lists so readers don’t have to click a million times and can easily scroll through a post. The primary reason to publish slideshows, as far as I can tell, is to juice page views and banner ad impressions. Slideshows are super annoying and lists are awesome so we do lists!

For the same reason, we don’t show crappy display ads and we make all our revenue from social advertising that users love and share. We never launched one of those “frictionless sharing” apps on Facebook that automatically shares the stories you click because those apps are super annoying. We don’t post deceptive, manipulative headlines that trick people into reading a story. We don’t focus on SEO or gaming search engines or filling our pages with millions of keywords and tags that only a robot will read. We avoid anything that is bad for our readers and can only be justified by short term business interests.

Instead, we focus on publishing content our readers love so much they think it is worth sharing. It sounds simple but it’s hard to do and it is the metric that aligns our company with our readers. In the long term is good for readers and good for business.

He goes on:

A couple years ago, we were trying unsuccessfully to sell social advertising to a market that only wanted to buy banners but things have changed dramatically since then. Now many agencies and brands are refusing to buy banners, companies that rely on traditional display units are suffering, and budgets are shifting rapidly to social advertising. One of our board members, who was initially skeptical of our decision to not run banners, recently said that “social advertising will be the biggest media business since cable television.” Times have changed.

Now we are leading the market, which is a huge opportunity, but it was pure luck that a social advertising market even exists for us to lead. It’s like we happened to start surfing a few minutes before a great wave rolled in. Or we built a locomotive and a few days later the train tracks got built. We were obsessed with social content and ads before anyone else cared and it was extremely lucky that the world shifted toward us when it did. The question now is how well we capitalize on our good fortune.

More:

Some companies only care about journalism and as a result the people focusing on lighter editorial fare or advertising are second class citizens. Some companies only care about traffic which creates an environment where good journalists can’t take the time to talk to sources or do substantive work. Some companies only care about ad revenue and actually force editors to create new sections or content just because brands want to sponsor it.

People don’t do good work when they feel like losers and are second class citizens within their own company. Fortunately we have avoided that problem. We love the silly, we love the substantive, and we love making advertising that is actually compelling. And when we are good at these three things it benefits everyone and the world.

One more highlight:

Our teams focused on social advertising are totally killing it, with a consultative sales team full of ideas for clients, a creative services team making incredibly entertaining and sharable ads, a social discovery team expanding campaigns to Facebook, Twitter, and across the web, and an ad ops team that traffics our campaigns with skill, grace, and dogged determination – it’s not surprising we are blowing away all our revenue goals. Gong!