SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:Subscription services. Netflix seems to be doing pretty well. Plenty of content generation.
Which worked great until a year or two ago when every company decided they wanted in on that model and now you need to have 8 different subscriptions for specific content.
Which I'm just not doing.
Duke said:SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:Subscription services. Netflix seems to be doing pretty well. Plenty of content generation.
Which worked great until a year or two ago when every company decided they wanted in on that model and now you need to have 8 different subscriptions for specific content.
Which I'm just not doing.
That's my conundrum as well. We had Netflix since whenever that became a thing, and then the Prime Video sort of tagged along. We bought Disney+ for the Baby Yoda Show, and I'd like to consider HBO Max for some of the stuff they have, but $10/month here and $15/month there starts to really add up. It looks like Hulu and the CBS one might have some interesting shows and maybe Peacock will. But I'm not about to spend the money to sign up for every one of these. But I guess if the ad revenue isn't paying the bills, something's got to.
I don't know... I keep seeing the American Powertrain ad on the site and it makes me wih they made an updated version of a T-9.
I tend to agree on the streaming services. I've had Netflix for years, but really don't use it enough to justify it. Amazon Prime was originally for the free shipping and the shows have been a nice bonus. I had a free trial of Disney+ thanks to my Verizon account, but after watching all of the available Marvel movies as well as the Star Wars stuff, I kept it going. Part of me does want CBS for the Star Trek stuff, but not that much... I mostly watch YouTube and support a number of creators I like through Patreon.
SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:Subscription services. Netflix seems to be doing pretty well. Plenty of content generation.
I wish you were right. I'm not sure it's that simple for everyone.
Successful models for how to fund content creation in the digital age seem to be hard to come by for those not extremely well funded and unwilling to sell ad space. I'm admittedly not that knowledgable about they're financial history, but Netflix built their subscription model on being a mail-order Blockbuster. They seemed to have been able to leverage that model to start creating content once streaming became a thing, but they didn't start from scratch. The only other major subscription-based-no-advertising platforms I can think of are in leauge with the networks (Hulu) or mega-corps (Disney, Prime Video). In both cases they're utilizing a ton of content created without them even existing.
People seem to have different expectations depending on the platform and type of content. Assuming there's no advertising generally are willing to pay for video (except the from the little guys), but not written content online. Although some have stayed afloat, I don't get the impression the paywall model is all that successful which is essentially a content subscription. It seems to have hurt journalism as a whole, but I'd be lying if I wasn't part of the problem.
GRM seems to be one of the few that has kept a traditional advertising model without diluting their content or trustworthyness. The lack of shareholder-driven business strategy might have something to do with that. Maybe something about valuing long-term growth and sustainability over short term profits? They could tell you better than me and I guess it's really not that hard to see either way.
I'll be honest. I appreaciate laughing at some of the ads I get. My internet is based out of a town a decent distance away in the next county.
"Single women in [meth capital] are looking for men!"
Not today, Satan... not today...
Matt B (fs) said:
GRM seems to be one of the few that has kept a traditional advertising model without diluting their content or trustworthyness. The lack of shareholder-driven business strategy might have something to do with that. Maybe something about valuing long-term growth and sustainability over short term profits? They could tell you better than me and I guess it's really not that hard to see either way.
This, plus valuing the trust our readers have given us. And, yeah, probably too much pride. Even when we run native ads--the advertorials that sometimes appear online--they're written by our staff and marked as paid content. It matters what we present to our readers, whether it's editorial, ads, or photos of JG in short shorts. (Probably time to do a "Where Are They Now" on those, come to think of it.)
Margie
Marjorie Suddard said:
...or photos of JG in short shorts. (Probably time to do a "Where Are They Now" on those, come to think of it.)
There's been more than a year of available dumpster fire; don't tell me nobody filed the shorts!
wae said:Duke said:SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:Subscription services. Netflix seems to be doing pretty well. Plenty of content generation.
Which worked great until a year or two ago when every company decided they wanted in on that model and now you need to have 8 different subscriptions for specific content.
Which I'm just not doing.
That's my conundrum as well. We had Netflix since whenever that became a thing, and then the Prime Video sort of tagged along. We bought Disney+ for the Baby Yoda Show, and I'd like to consider HBO Max for some of the stuff they have, but $10/month here and $15/month there starts to really add up. It looks like Hulu and the CBS one might have some interesting shows and maybe Peacock will. But I'm not about to spend the money to sign up for every one of these. But I guess if the ad revenue isn't paying the bills, something's got to.
Maybe a smart guy could come up with a way to bundle all the streaming services together, so you only paid one fee to a local supplier...
Is there a parallel between:
I keep feeling like there must be a solution that gets rid of all the cruft, gets folks stuff they actually want to watch, and I suppose doesn't necessarily kibosh a certain amount of "we've got to do a certain amount of bundling or else content about road racing Italian cars built within ten years of WWII just isn't going to hit the numbers." Some bundling facilitates neat stuff with a smaller audience. But some of it is just "nope, you gotta buy this crap or you can't have anything. How much crap can we tack on before they stop buying entirely?"
I guess, really, most of the stuff I watch a lot on YouTube I do some amount of Patreon contribution for. Perhaps direct support is the thing, but it doesn't work for stuff that you only look at once or only rarely.
Duke said:SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:Subscription services. Netflix seems to be doing pretty well. Plenty of content generation.
Which worked great until a year or two ago when every company decided they wanted in on that model and now you need to have 8 different subscriptions for specific content.
Which I'm just not doing.
Toyman01 (Moderately Supportive Dude) said:I just wish they could actually target ads. Show me a product I'm actually interested in and I will probably click on it. Don't show me the same add another 1000 times though. Once or twice is enough.
Unfortunately, for all their boasting about being able to target ads, they really suck at it.
There's a lot of machine learning and AI at play here.
For example, I bought my daughter a novelty sweat shirt that was advertised on the book of faces for Christmas. So, I was an *actual* purchaser of clothing targeted at young women. That is valuable to a machine learning algorithm. Parallel to that, I have a long history of buying auto parts, beer, hunting/fishing gear and outdoor recreation equipment. This is SUPER VALUABLE, as it indicates the possibility of being a repeat customer.
So, I started to get flooded with all sorts of crap aimed at a young, female market in addition to what I normally got. For a while, my feed was full of angsty tween clothing, Beskpoke Manly Man boxes, makeup, kayaking equipment, handbags, camp stoves, the cutest animal socks ever, knives,cute designer boots, tactical gear, Budweiser (marked as offensive, actually) and so on: you get the idea.
As others have noted, those ads only have to prove profitable over the long term. If their batting average is .00001, but that ratio lets them be profitable, it's a winning situation, provided that the 100k people they missed don't decide to become hostile to them.
The problem is "being good" at targeting marketing means missing 100,000 times is perfectly alright, even if you include some hilarious mismatches. It might even be super successful, as long as enough people are buying.
I cant be the only guy who immediately compares wheel weight vs style in the Tire Rack ad am I? Every issue.
Not totally on topic, or maybe it is.
I'm watching the Rolex 24 on Canuck Discovery Velocity channel. Pfaff is a primary advertisement. I see it every single break, and if I have the need to buy a sewing machine, I will buy a Singer...
Second, what is Pfaff, other than a sewing machine manufacturer and sponsor of a Porsche? It seems very normal in advertising now to not tell us what you are. Am I supposed to be curious enough to look it up online? A clue. Just a hint. When will I need your product? After a car accident? Making an omelette? Cleaning the kitchen?
I guess I'm talking about them, which is the point...
I refresh YouTube pages to skip the ad. I skip past every add I can. I pay the premium Hulu and Spotify subscriptions to skip ads (they got me there) and I will Intentionally not buy from companies with annoying ad campaigns. I don't give a berk about what you're selling and if find most marketing to be extremely abrasive and stressful.
and get off my lawn.
spandak said:I refresh YouTube pages to skip the ad. I skip past every add I can. I pay the premium Hulu and Spotify subscriptions to skip ads (they got me there) and I will Intentionally not buy from companies with annoying ad campaigns. I don't give a berk about what you're selling and if find most marketing to be extremely abrasive and stressful.
and get off my lawn.
Completely agree. On line adds are in your face and always seem to be getting between me and what I want to look at. The best of the worst are the Amazon adds that pop up just as I am about to pay for something. Gives me time to ponder if I really want to purchase it. I have actually canceled orders thanks to there aggressive advertising
Print adds are much better. I actually read the ads in GRM magazine but when it is on a computer screen the adds are intrusive and annoying.
As a side note the new adds in the forum only serve to put a place holder between new content and the sticky posts. Meaning I now ignore the sticky posts while ignoring the adds. Actually helpful kind of but I am sure GRM did not intend it to work this way.
In reply to Brett_Murphy (Ex-Patrón) :
Unfortunately, 90% of the ads that pop up on my FB page are for things I would never even consider looking at. I don't play video games. I get 50% game ads. I can't imagine there are that many mid 50 year old men that play phone games all day long.
If I got auto parts and tools, or camping ads that would be great. But no, I get ads for gardening benches or bath mats. Items I not only have never looked at, I probably never will.
Then when you do actually click an ad, they just show the same ad 1000 more times. Not a variety from different companies, not different products that are similar, but the exact same one you have already seen.
I would think with all the computing power available to a large company, they could hit a little closer to the mark. Which tells me it's probably just lazy programming or I don't fit into a demographic they understand.
I tried to flag irrelevant ads as such to teach the algorithm, hoping to get some interesting ads. That was a waste of time. Now I just flag everything stupid as offensive. Also probably a waste of time, but it makes me smile.
In reply to Toyman01 (Moderately Supportive Dude) :
FB is great at showing me ads for stuff I've already bought.
1988RedT2 said:Edit: Most ads are lies aimed at separating a potential customer from his money. A truly honest product sells itself.
As long as people are aware it exists.
Something else to remember is that advertising also is basically what makes any sort of professional auto racing a thing. MX-5 Cup itself is an ad campaign. Chevy isn't the official truck of Daytona International Speedway because DIS or the France family thinks that the Silverado is better than the Ram or the Silverado - GM is paying for that. And they're not paying for that because they really believe that DIS is a worthy cause or something - it's for advertising. If you took out all the advertising, there would be no IMSA to watch - Yeah, they have plenty of pay drivers, but they're not plastering Konica Minolta on the side of their car down at WTR because they really like cameras. Hell, look at what happened to racing when the tobacco money had to pull out.
I'll grant you that some advertising is better than others, but so far it's been the most effective way to pay for things that people wouldn't want to actually pay for.
YouTubes often has a survey before a video. Like a fool, I took one, thinking it would lessen or completely cut out the ads in the video as a "reward " for taking said survey. Nope. Nothing.
Never again.
Streetwiseguy said:I'm watching the Rolex 24 on Canuck Discovery Velocity channel. Pfaff is a primary advertisement. I see it every single break, and if I have the need to buy a sewing machine, I will buy a Singer...
So the only company willing to cough up enough to get racing on a screen where you can see it gets your ire? (EDIT: for my reading comprehension fail about "primary" and not "only", but I think my point mostly stands, assuming CDV wanted to sell that many slots to show racing)
Hopefully it pays off so the analysis allows Discovery to show other companies that it pays off so they can show you a variety of ads, and maybe more racing.
I do feel like racing coverage is kind of a special case: There are certainly plenty of ads that make me say "I'll buy anything else," but when it's supporting something niche that is normally relatively hard to get, they get a pass from me.
I certainly get bored when I see the same Hagerty and Mazda ads repeated ad nauseum (pun intended) throughout the Runoffs coverage, but a big chunk of me is grateful that those two ponied up enough to make it happen. I'm not sure they're getting any more for their money than if they'd showed them a couple of times, but until the SCCA can sell the other slots to other companies, thanks to them for chipping in.
It's really the exception to my general impression that advertising the way it exists today makes the world considerably worse. I know there's a need to do promotion, to spread the news of your product, but we're so far beyond that now that it's... nauseating.
In reply to Jesse Ransom (FFS) :
The point of my upset is that I saw the ad once every ten minutes, and I know absolutely nothing about what the company does. Other than build sewing machines... And they may not even do that anymore.
When Speedvision first fired up, they had noadvertising, so they showed old car ads from the 50's and 60's. That was better than the channel showing the same ad until I set the dvr and come back so I can skip the ads.
I understand the need for ad revenue for racing. Don't make me hate you, don't confuse me.
In reply to Streetwiseguy :
Sorry, think I put too much emphasis on the repetition part.
Surely they could make ads that work and aren't as actively unpleasant to watch. But I dunno... I spent my first four years as a software developer at a marketing agency. It wasn't that they wanted things to be unpleasant for the consumer, it's that it's well outside the scope of work. Lots of emphasis on measurable gains, "fun for user" isn't on this list at all. This was a small place, and TV ads weren't a thing we did, really. Certainly the choices made on the websites I worked on weren't about pleasantness.
But that's the underlying thing; if it was actually worse for them to show you the same ad six times an hour, they wouldn't. So the DVR is a great solution; when they feel compelled to make the ads more palatable because too many DVR past them, they will.
To the OP's point, and several others here along the way; the way they're doing it works. I'm absolutely certain it could be done better, of course, but however mis-targeted, sideways, repetitive, or annoying, I guarantee you they're watching the numbers as they twiddle the knobs. They're running variations on the content, the patterns, the frequency, and analyzing the results. However chaotic it looks, it's being improved, and it's absolutely more effectively targeted than "This much print, this much prime time TV, this much daytime TV, this many infomercials," even if that's damning by faint praise.
Ugh.
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