LogFAQs > #902267556

Questionmarktarius posted...

So, sell ads. Carve out a "your ad here" box somewhere in the layout, stick a hyperlinked jpeg in there, and charge a monthly rate or something.

This is a perfectly reasonable approach for the internet of 20 years ago, and an absolute non-starter for today.

Back then, the content of website was set almost entirely by the hosts. Where user-made content existed, it was largely in the form of forums or chatrooms and was generally ancillary to whatever the main purpose of the site was.

Now? The overwhelming majority of time spent online is spent looking at content created by people other than the company hosting it, whether that's Youtube, Facebook, or Imgur. And that's a significant problem for advertisers because if I'm spending money to put my ad on your website, I want to know that the eyeballs that are seeing it are ones that are actually valuable to me. If I sell arthritis medication in Sweden, I don't want to waste my money by having my ad shown to eight-year-olds in Australia.

That's exactly why we have ad scripts in the first place. There's far, far too much content on sites like Youtube for them to be manually reviewed and have advertisements placed that way, so the algorithm looks at who you are, where you live, what sort of videos and websites you visit, and shows you ads it thinks will be relevant to you (which, at least on the surface, is not an indefensible practice - I would much rather see ads for things I'm actually likely to buy rather than stuff that isn't even remotely applicable to me).

The internet has moved far beyond the sort of model your advocating. No advertiser would ever support that model and understandably so.
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