Monetization is all about supporting the payer. One cannot charge memberships for consumers and then insult them by ambushing their experience by inserting ads inline to support the advertiser.

Advertisers want first to be noticed, and then to be desired. Actually, they don’t care about either if they are selling more stuff to current and new customers.

Let’s just turn advertising information into general content, and organize it in such a way that consumers will hang out where that content is displayed.

60 years ago the publishing world discovered the value of advertising as news. PM, the advertising free afternoon NY paper, quickly hear their readers asking, Where’re the ads? So they wrote news stories about the ads in competing newspapers. Problem solved. Profits discovered.

Enterprise news in such a service, supported by consumer memberships, would be relatively straight forward, and could be limited to ‘enterprise member news’ … so in the end, all revenue is subscription revenue.

I realize this is perhaps more integrated that you were planning.

But some of the best companies known purely for yield optimization are included in that bubble: AdMeld, Pubmatic, and Rubicon.

Thanks for reading and commenting! Feel free to reach out if you want to talk more!

This means they already have a competitive edge in the marketplace over any competitors–even if those competitors begin by offering more local deals. It’d be easy for Groupon to adapt, or even buy up these smaller companies.

Groupon’s only disadvantage is getting too big (and hence too slow when it’s time to adapt).

Most people are exactly like you; they don’t click on ads, interact with them, or study them intently. That’s why the performance of online ad campaigns these days is judged less and less by CTR (click through rate); it was far more important in the earlier days of online advertising.

The industry is finding that display ads serve more similarly to billboards. If Coca Cola buys some online display ad space, they might not care if you click because you would never buy a can of Coke over the internet. But hopefully Coke gets more ad spend for their buck because that ad is only delivered to relevant consumers. In the case of a billboard or TV commercial, those ads will be viewed by thousands of people outside of Coke’s target market–basically a waste of their intended as spend.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean about timing, but it sounds like it would fit into the necessity for better integration. If an ad comes up at the wrong time, my argument is that it’s integration with content is bad. Ad tech needs to find a better time to display the ad within the content for people like you.

And you must not have used Hulu lately, but you are forced to let the ads play. They don’t require you to click through to the brand, they simply ask you whether or not the ad is relevant. It’s just like a TV commercial that lets the viewer choose which ad they would like to see.

In summary, click throughs should not be a significant judge of ad campaign performance for the reasons you stated. More and more companies are realizing this. But I would be willing to bet that better relevancy of ads on the media you consume would create more influence over you than less relevancy. And you will be less likely to get mad at a brand if their ads are integrated well with the content. Both of these are more likely to occur with internet technologies than traditional media and advertising.