While still large, 3rd-party payout was about 20% of Google's revenue ($1.75b total). Here is the breakdown, from their quarterly report (http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings....):

   Total Google revenues: $9.03b
      Revenues from Google properties: $6.23b
      Revenues from the AdSense network: $2.48b
         Google cut of AdSense revenues: $0.73b
         Payouts to AdSense publishers: $1.75b

On other sites we typically see 1-3% with a decent conversion. I threw a lot of money at Reddit and was REALLY disappointed with the outcome.

If you rule out advertising income because you don't like adverts, or because you don't have the skills necessary, then you're missing out on a slice of a gigantic pie. The vast majority of the general population are receptive to advertising and find it useful.

I think it's worth remembering that most people in the tech world are absolute outliers. In the real world, most people own and watch a TV. Most people buy newspapers. Most people view and click on adverts. Most people don't own ipads. etc etc

edit: You can downmod this all you like. You're the one missing out on the money.

That's terrible justification to do something I consider sleazy just to make a buck. I am a proponent of the idea of voting with my wallet, unfortunately for some reason that concept seems to get whitewashed by people who justify ignoring it by saying its "just business". That mindset is even stronger by people who are not end consumers.

>You're the one missing out on the money.

I used to be OK running enough ads for my web properties to cover hosting. Then I discovered I had scruples.

Advertising is not 'sleazy'. It works, and it provides a service to both advertiser, publisher, and consumer.

Do you also consider online dating to be sleazy, or job posting sites? Because that's essentially what advertising is - matching a consumer interested in something, to an advertiser who provides something.

Without advertising, most consumers would not have a clue what products and services exist. Most manufacturers would have no way to tell people about the service/product they provide.

I'm literally amazed at the naivety.

I agree that at its best advertising is matching, basically filling in an information gap. But it often does the opposite, exploiting an information gap / ignorance; in fact it's often explicitly and completely unapologetically aimed at doing that, looking to create and exploit information asymmetries. You make more money by selling people an expensive version of something they can get equivalent cheaper, or by luring people into a contract whose full cost they don't realize up front. There's a reason advertisers tend to read up on behaviorist psychology, because exploiting weaknesses in human decision-making, to encourage people to allocate their resources in a way that they wouldn't do with perfect information, is a big part of the game.

I may just know the wrong people, but I don't actually know anybody in marketing who doesn't have a sort of cynical "tricking suckers into buying our clients' stuff" view, at least some of the time. That's the game; you don't last long in the business if you have a purely idealistic view of only matching people to quality products that are a good match for them, especially since at larger firms you often have no choice about which products you're supposed to be selling.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

>it provides a service to both advertiser, publisher, and consumer

Given the number of advertizing channels, and the pool of products and services offered, the cost (in time) to the consumer, is rather high just to learn that X exists.

>Do you also consider online dating to be sleazy, or job posting sites? Because that's essentially what advertising is - matching a consumer interested in something, to an advertiser who provides something.

I'd agree that they are essentially the same if I had to go to "fast food" section of craigslist to find out what fast food joints out there, or the "auto insurance" section to find out that Progressive is a thing.

>I'm literally amazed at the naivety.

Say I accept your premise, that still doesn't negate the fact that there is enough advertizement in other mediums that all the virtues of it are already sufficiently met that adding advertizement to my websites don't create any value for the visitor.

I don't believe in the eradication of advertizement, just that it has reached a level of permeation that subjecting my visitors to even more of it is something I do not believe in.

Most people can tune out things they're not interested in.

Just as you walk down a street, you are bombarded with shop signage, and you filter out the ones that interest you, and the ones that don't. You read a magazine, and when faced with an advert that's not relevant or interesting, you turn the page.

There are certainly people who do not have the ability to cope well with adverts on the internet, and for them, adblock exists.

Vermont is a tourist trap and as such doesn't allow billboards. Should they allow them and just tell the leaf-peepers to enjoy the scenery around the billboards? Or is the presence of advertizement, willfully ignored or not, still intrusive?

We don't allow advertizement in schools (well, thats eroding, but anyway..), I'm willing to bet your workplace isn't covered in advertizement posters and have an intercom and/or tvs constantly blaring ads all day unless you work a particularity shitty, most likely retail, job. Why not? If you could just decide to tune out the ads once and never worry about it again, why not?

Advertizing is a necessary evil. You can just say that. You don't have to justify it as a practice you (or others) engage in beyond that. No, I don't think its _evil_ evil, I'm just using the phase, but what I don't understand is that you seem to be arguing for it beyond its role as a necessary evil. Why do you? Are you defending it as a practice you have diluted yourself into beveling is good for everyone so that you don't have to feel conflicted about engaging in it? Are you just talking the talk to make a practice you engage in (and yourself as a user) look better in the court of public opinion? Have you just swallowed the "if its profitable, it is therefore good in every metric" ideology hook, line and sinker? I really don't get where you're coming from.

Sounds like it would conflict with Vermont's branding. In other words, for Vermont beautiful foliage is a far better inducement to get people to come and spend money than a bunch of signs with words on them.

I work from home, and generally have the TV on all the time, showing me amongst other things, adverts. It doesn't bother me. In fact I find it very useful and interesting.

It's no more a necessary evil than "shops" are.

Shops are pretty much advertising. They connect a consumer to several manufacturers. They stock things you might want to buy. You go in, get bombarded with branding advertising products. You filter out the ones you want, and buy them. The shop gets a cut of revenue, just like a website gets a cut of any sale after a user clicks on an advert (Either directly, or averaged out to a per click/impression price).

Some people do hate shops as well. I've gone to the mall with people who find the whole experience absolutely horrible and uncomfortable. Personally, I love browsing round shops, seeing what you can find.

Shops are pretty much advertising by their very nature. A shop without a stock of goods for you to buy wouldn't be a very useful shop.

Ignoring that weird anology, you seem to be arguing that since you personally enjoy advertising, then everyone else in the world should just deal with advertising all the time, because, well, speckledjim on HN doesn't really mind it all that much.

It's just not a very convincing argument.

I'm basing it on data and numbers. If advertising didn't work, it wouldn't be a $multibillion industry.

If advertising is just about educating consumers, why don't advertisers run ads that are critical of their own products? A half-truth can be worse than an outright lie, because it is more confusing.

If people don't want to see the ads, well they can go find some other site to see: it's that simple. They get to use my site(s) for free, so I think it's a pretty good deal for them.

There's an arguable point from an anarchist, I suppose, viewpoint about the tyrrany of property laws and concentration of resources, but that's not I'd suggest what most graffiti artists are trying to bring to the forefront with their work.

I can't think of a community that is less anti-advertising. If I had a nickel for every time a Redditor has talked about purposely leaving ad-block off on that site...

>If it was really all that successful, I don't think all the employees would have left.

I believe their payroll is significantly higher than it has ever been. No way to know what individual salaries look like, but it's beyond argument that they have more employees now, and those employees are being paid well enough to stay.

I do agree though that this does not speak to online advertising in general. Reddit is a single site, -obviously not enough data points to make broad pronouncements about the health of online advertising (which, incidentally, is a market predicted to be around 34 billion in 2012 in the U.S. alone...).

I've never earned more than a pittance from any of the ads on my sites.

There's unfortunately a lot of people who believe all you need to do is slap ads on any website and watch the money come in. It actually takes time, effort, learning, and to some extent skill to know what will work and what won't work. You either need targeted users with intent, or you need more users.

Saying you can't make money from online advertising is like a non-programmer saying you can't write a tetris game. They're saying that because they haven't learnt to program yet and so it seems impossible to them.

> that doesn't necessarily meant that online advertising works, either.

The fact that Google paid out $4bn or whatever last quarter to 3rd party websites surely shows that online advertising works.

It's evident that it works for some markets and sites, but it just seems to be quite difficult compared to charging money for a product.