Howdy! As I mentioned earlier this month, we are making a switch from one ad platform to another in order to improve various aspects of how we end up serving advertisements on this website. The big one is: If you’re a member, you still shouldn’t be seeing most (or any) ads if you’re logged in.
For everyone else, you might see a couple of different kinds of ad units from the ones we normally have. In the tradeoff between visibility and ad density, we’re trading a little bit more visibility for a little bit lower density. This means you might get an ad that stays with you in the sidebar, but fewer ads in the actual stories you read.
The theory was that we’ve had all these ads every few paragraphs in stories but, as you get lower on the page, visibility gets lower. We have a lot of long articles, and this meant loading a ton of ads on one page that maybe didn’t get seen. This lower visibility possibly caused the ad rates we get to go down a little. In swapping over to fewer ads, we might actually make more money overall by being able to charge a higher amount for the ads we do have.
Another ongoing change will be that ad pressure (i.e., how many ads you see) may decrease with the number of visits you make. If we have a viral story and you never read the site, it might show you a few more ads (or new ad types) in order to try and make a little more money off visitors who aren’t likely to come back often. When those visitors realize this is the greatest website in the world, as they return, that pressure gets turned down, they fall in love and, hopefully, become members of a site that feels better than a lot of other sites they visit.
Some of this follows the logic of membership itself. As you come to the site a lot, the amount we can charge the same advertiser to show you the same ad goes down. The number of times you’d have to visit the website to make up for even what we get for our lowest plan (Cloth Annual) is not only super high, and it gets harder the more you visit. So thank you for being a member if you are! It’s way more efficient and allows us to plan for the future more easily.
If you’re not a member, then you may see us try to make our ad setup smarter and not just show everyone more ads all the time. Just know that we’re trying to make changes slowly, test what we do, and listen to feedback from users.
The numbers so far are very encouraging and, other than people pointing out a bug here or there, I haven’t seen any real complaints. We’re trying to prove you can have a site that balances membership and advertising in a way that makes the Internet a better place to be.
Thanks for reading all this!
UPDATE: We have two different vendors (one for video, one for everything else), and so we have to make a couple of shifts as we’ve overlapped some of the ad behavior. Additionally, as someone pointed out, x-ing out one of the units doesn’t stop it from coming back for some reason. Will address and update, sorry for the temporary annoyance. Please accept this 21% off coupon for any plan, and most (or all) of these ads will go away.
Photo: Ford Heritage Vault
UPDATE: As Matt pointed out, we’re having some overlap. Will tweak to fix.
Matt quoting Matt?
Probably nothing an updated ad blocker can’t sort.
Matt, I’ll probably upgrade my membership on the next drive. I read this site FAR more than any other automotive site I may visit.
I’m considering finally dropping my long time C/D and R&T paper subscriptions. They still have some great content, but I no longer eagerly read either cover to cover like I did even 10 years ago. Both are now bi-monthly. R&T is boutique, C/D seems lost.
How much do I need to pay for no ads? I am currently Vinyl Annual and I still get ads.
You shouldn’t be seeing ads, but it’s not showing you logged in as a member. Can you shoot me an email?
I was just perusing the site and I noticed on the top Autopian bar there’s a section labelled ‘tips’. Is this for the authors to give the readers helpful automotive tips, or is it for us readers to leave tips for the authors for writing such great content?
Either way, nothing happens when I click on it on my Windows 11 PC using Chrome.
Edit: I see that a little “mailto:tips@TheAutopian.com?subject= Tips shows up at the bottom left of my screen when I hover my mouse pointer over ‘tips’ but nothing happens when I click on it.
So here’s my tip: The ‘tips’ link doesn’t work for everybody.
So that’s a client side (IE your computer) issue. If you don’t have a default mail client (Outlook) installed, your computer does not know how to interpret that link. This has become a more common issue with people relying on strictly webmail, like Gmail etc. VS having Outlook, Eudora, or some other application installed as an email client.
I’m also using Chrome, and I observed that if you right-click the “Tips” link, it gives you an option to “copy email address” which will let you paste that into whatever you are using for your email, and you can then send your message to the Autopian staff.
Thanks!
MH: I’ve been super busy working lately but I haven’t forgotten about the site. I’m changing jobs soon and should have a lot more time and ideally a lot more expertise soon
Ah more self playing video ads. That’s one small step for a site towards the old German lighting site.
Yeah yeah, become a member, that’s the late stage capitalism solution to everything.
Paying directly for content was old school capitalism.
Ad supported content that was free to the user was the next step. We have now found that it doesnt really work.
The latest step is to make the ads so annoying that people will go back to paying directly for content.
Holy crap I think the notifications button works on mobile now.
The more I am exposed to self playing videos, I haven’t asked for, the less I want to watch them – or read anything by the people in them 🙁
Ads I don’t care about, just do whatever you want with those [thumbs up emoji]
If you become a member, the self-playing videos go away!
I know, I wish I could afford that.
Then I’m doing it wrong because I am a member and still get self playing videos.
I’m going to try to remember to reach out to you in a bit, I’d love to know your experience and help fix it (it’s late Sunday for me and I’ve got a long workweek ahead of me)
As a member, I thankfully don’t see the ads. That alone is worth the subscription but knowing that it’s helping put money in employees’ pockets is also meaningful to me.
Now if only comment ordering could be sorted by oldest first and landing at the oldest comment at the end of the article, so I can read the comments before I post something redundant or ask a question that’s already been answered, I’d probably be so happy I’d go up a level of membership.
Comments, this
One other suggestion: hold aside a few “evergreen” articles to slip in over the weekends.
Sometimes the amount of content posted on weekdays is overwhelming. You could identify a few that can wait and then reward readers who make more visits to this largely great site.
“” Now if only comment ordering could be sorted by oldest first ”
I only wish I could upvote this more than once. I’ve asked many times if they have a plan to either sort comment oldest on top or at least make it an option many times. Zero response.
Well except some snark from David that made no sense and didnt answer the question.
100% this. It should be the default setting.
One of the many things I appreciate about this site is the behind the scenes content.
Fixed ad on the right is fine. Oh, wait. Well it was fine until it changed to a third video ad. Multiple video ads just make the page/site unusable, too distracting. Sure, I could be a member but I choose to support via (some) ads instead. Presumably this is okay otherwise you’d just paywall the whole site, no?
The two initial popup videos are annoying in that one is a banner in the center bottom of the page. When clicking to close it (i.e. you got the impression from it) it goes away but comes back a few seconds later. It’s annoying enough to just make me do something more productive rather than stay on the site. The bottom right ad doesn’t seem closable until you actually click on it, it then opens a new window and when you go back to the original page, it stays gone.
When the ad is closed it should stay closed! That’s a bug.
Member Up!
100% – Easily one of the best memberships I have!
I got 3 autoplay video ads and 9 more bottom banner ads reading this. I accidentally clicked on 4 of them because the X is so small. and they pop back up even after hitting the x.
If it’s what is needed to keep this website going I understand but it’s frustrating when the ad comes back just a few seconds after closing it.
These are some bugs that need to get worked out. Thanks for your patience!
Advertising is key but I would not mind them if they were more ads of what I might purchase. Tires, maybe sell a link on Verdstat tires in an article about them.
I’ve got annoying ads popping up all over and are very distracting.
Looks like we’ve moved two ads and they’re on top of one another.
I’m too membership for this.
… Adrian? Is that you?
I logged out and turned off uBlock just to learn where the ads get inserted. This also got me to try tweaking my cosmetic filters and I re-enabled the embedded video since it doesn’t seem to auto-play.
I’m still seeing a 4-10 second delay before any page starts to load, so changing ad nets probably rules out them as a cause of that.
Seeing that same delay.
The site is really slow. I believe it’s running on WordPress which is part of the problem and aside from that, they probably need to work on optimizing the caching and maybe running it on faster servers.
More like it’s running on Microsoft Paint, probably. The lag before anything loads is ridiculous.
Good to know I’m not the only one. A few reloads with the browser’s network monitor open shows 3-4 seconds for whatever page is loading, occasionally 10-13… It’s been a couple decades since I did web dev, but my read is the page is being put together fresh each time, not cached. Hopefully that’s an easy addition.
Slowest loading site in my rotation.
I’ve been trying to test that but it’s so slow and inconsistent that it’s hard to even characterize. My tests would just time out… With a timeout of 30s :grimace:
“I’m still seeing a 4-10 second delay before any page starts to load”
I just right click on my Autopian” bookmark, open it in a new tab, then right click on my “Jalopnik” bookmark, open that in a new tab, then click on over there to read what’s new. After a while, I go back to the Autopian and everything has opened up by then.
This way the delay doesn’t really matter.
As always, the transparency is appreciated!
As are the pics of forgotten everyday Fords. Keep ’em coming Matt!