FYI, We Are Still Making Ongoing Tweaks To The Ad Layout

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!

Photo: Ford Heritage Vault