If the website looks a little different today, there’s a good reason for that! We’ve swapped ad platforms. If the website looks extremely different today, there’s a bad reason for that, because it means we screwed up somehow. Allow me to explain.
I let members know about this yesterday, but I wanted to share the information here for all readers and for members who might have missed the email.
In case you’re about to get all “i ain’t reading all that. im happy for you tho, or sorry that happened” on me, here’s the short version: We are switching the company/platform we use for ads, and this means you might see ads temporarily if you’re a member. Or maybe not! Maybe no one will see ads.
The first thing we noticed is that there’s a hard-coded ad unit on the top of the front page that we’ll have to remove by hand. In the interim, you might see two ads in that slot. We’ll fix it ASAP (and one is going to be a house ad, so probably something from a non-profit).
I wanted to let you know so you wouldn’t think we changed the basic premise of membership, or that we lost our minds. Our goal is to make it so that no one even notices anything changed, and there won’t be much of a difference in ad pressure/layout to begin with, just a different ad platform
If you’re not interested in how ads work or why we’re doing this, that’s all you absolutely need to know. Thank you for your patience with all of this. If you notice anything weird, you can always leave a comment or let us know in the Discord.
If you are interested, I’ll explain a little bit below. But first, a photo from Ford’s archives of the 2003 Mustang Mach 1.
Ok, now that we’ve got that out of the way, allow me to explain. When we launched ads, our basic premise was that we didn’t want to overdo it. Specifically, we wanted about 50% less “ad pressure” compared to our main competitors. This was easy because they all had so many ads. We also didn’t want to go with an ad partner that was going to try to sneak/force too many ads on the page, which is what a lot of them do.
Knowing that membership was so important, and not liking it when other websites became impossible to read, we went with a company that would support our goals. People won’t become members of a site if they think they’re paying for an inferior product, ads or no ads.
It worked very well, for a time, and our income from ads seemed to be better-than-average. The original firm we worked with got sold to another, larger company, and ad performance dropped. We started making less from the same amount of traffic or, worse, less from more traffic. Some of this might be the market in general, but increasing ad pressure didn’t seem to result in more revenue, and it became clear we needed to try something new.
To that end, we’re partnering with a European company called Sparteo that’s just launching here in the United States. Sparteo was created by publishers and seems to have the right mix of tools for a site of our size. I think that’ll help us both make more money from the current ad layout, and allow us to be more flexible about how we show ads and to whom. Additionally, our current ad provider list is full of a lot of people rebundling/reselling our traffic multiple times over, and I think that creates both a lot of energy waste while also generating less revenue. I can’t prove this, but that’s my guess.
For the next two weeks, we’ll be switching over from our current provider to Sparteo. This process usually takes a couple of weeks, and we’ll probably discover all sorts of little decisions we made along the way that we’ll have to make again. After that, we’ll begin A/B testing different ad layouts and types. My thinking is that, for flyby traffic/first-time visitors, we can get away with ad types we don’t currently support, and then remove ad pressure as someone visits more. This way, we very well may earn more income overall while also making it a more pleasant experience for repeat visitors.
One big change we’re implementing right away is that the system will be better at recognizing subheads and won’t try to shove ads in between.
Again, this is going to be an ongoing process over the next few weeks. It looks like some ads are being served, but we’ll probably lose a couple of days’ worth of revenue in the changeover. If you’ve ever been thinking about becoming a member, today would be an awesome day to do it! Use the code “newedge” and get $5 off any plan.
All photos: Ford
Some of the sites I use have a specific banner ad that’s hosted by the site itself that users can buy adspace for for their own advertisements. For businesses, hobbies, ect. Would be neat to have that here for members to buy ad space for their own stuff. The ad itself just being a simple gif or static image that can be clicked on.
The ads you guys have are significantly lower than any of the old pages I used to read. I know ads are there to make money, but am I the only one that just doesn’t pay attention to them? As long as it’s not a popup, auto play video that covers the whole screen, I could not tell you what a single ad was that was in this article.
Still looking for the Paypal option to buy a membership! 🙂
In the meantime I will whitelist theautopian.com in my ad blocker.
A co-worker of mine bought the first year “Limited Edition” Mach 1 in gun metal gray. He was extremely pissed off to find out that it was not, in fact a “Limited Edition” as they sold them again in 2004. LOL
I, for one, am enjoying the SN95 content.
Loving the new ads, they are a better size and very relevant. I got ads for used Cadillacs on the coal caddie article.
Please be aware of the impact of ads on mobile browsing quality. This was a huge part of my abandoning Jalopnik, which happened long before Autopian.
One of the first Autopian articles I looked at this morning crashed repeatedly, phone heating up to the point where I gave up trying to view it. I noticed I was logged out (odd) so I logged back in and performance was more like normal. I then logged out again as I recall you mentioning ads are different for members and and the page was still OK. Hopefully it was just a glitch that is sorted.
I have always used an iPhone that was 3 or 4 generations behind current, and use Safari browser. Long ago the Gawker Media sites all became (and I think are still to this day) destructive to my phones. Trying to browse any article you could see the battery bar plummeting and the phone feels like it’s about to catch fire. Usually the pages crash repeatedly.. forget ever getting to the bottom of a long read. I speculated this was a part of why slideshows became so big there. Reader mode seems to help a little but never enough.
All of the crappiest sites are like that today, ads causing crashing pages and burning phone. You do not want to be in that camp! I trust you guys will get it sorted though.
Thanks for the note! We want to avoid all of that, and bringing the ads in via plugin versus the old way will hopefully help. That being said, yeah, this morning we were swapping stuff around and fixing things, which will probably continue this week. If you’re logged in you hopefully won’t notice.
All I have to say is adblockers are great and so are new edge Mustangs.
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If there are only 2 bots on this site, I’m not sure whether I should be proud that they keep the site so clean, or concerned that it’s not popular enough to attract bots.
2.
Always whitelist The Autopian meself.
Good luck, I hope it goes smoothly as I enjoy visiting this site more than almost any other on the current WWW.
The modern ad-infested internet is not only a drain on your soul, it’s made browsing less safe. I’ve been running adblockers and NoScript for years, and am happy to be able to support sites directly. Plus I imagine my membership is orders of magnitude more money than comes from viewing ads. I don’t expect you to divulge the info, but I still wonder how much money an ad-viewing user brings.
I like the “Privacy Badger” extension from EFF, that comes standard in Firefox for a while. It lists the and count the number of trackers in a website and let you disable individual ones.
It led me to became a member, so I can visit without cookies/trackers guilt free.
Matt wrote about it once, I think it’s thousands of page views just to equal a cloth membership.
Counter productive at best.
Can’t get weirder than the “See Caroline Levitt in a bikini ads” I got before.
Oh, yikes and yuck. That kind of thing seems like one to copy the link from (but don’t click through) and report to the staff. Too many of us browse this at work, and the Autopian staff’s been good about responding to ads that cross the line.
I don’t mind seeing ads if it means you can all get paid more.
Congrats on your new ad platform. I’ll give a proper response, but first I’m going to enjoy this delicious meal from Factor, delivered straight to my home using only premium ingredients. Factor meals are simple. All I have to do is stab the cover a few times, pop it in the microwave, wait a few minutes, and enjoy! In this case, I’ll be enjoying this delicious Chicken Ravioli with a side of potato gumbo! Factor’s convenience has me eating healthier and is saving me time over those ridiculous “cook your own meal” boxes.
Anyway, what was I saying? Oh year. This is cool.
I sure hope it doesn’t cause the site to take forever to load. /s
If anything, it should load a little faster? We’re making ongoing changes on the back end to try and address this issue.
Every other site I visit loads instantly. theautopian.com takes about 4 or 5 seconds. And every article within the site takes another 4-5 seconds to load. Generally, if I visit a site and it takes that long to load, I expect to receive a Cloudflare or similar message that the site is down. I just wait for this site to load, eventually. It’s not a big deal to me but, I would imagine someone coming here for the first time would just x-out to somewhere else.
Perspective. Do you remember internet on dial up? Compared to that I am willing to wait 4 seconds.
Now that you said, Autopian is the site that takes most to load among the ones I usually visit. I believe that is some sort of DoS protection, because it loads normally after a few seconds, while most of the other sites load basically instantly.
The Autopian is actively fighting against the enshittification of everything… and we’re all better for it. Keep up the good fight friends!
As an SN95 NE owner, I appreciate the pics. To my eyes anyway, still a sharp design even after all these years. Though I will admit the original SN95’s is growing on me again after loving it in the 90s then hating it in the 00s.
Does yours also have motion blur on the wheels when no one is driving it, like the one in the topshot? 😀
Just like the card from a matchbox car!
Glad to see this. It was a reminder to turn off my ad-blocking here, and even better when I reloaded I didn’t see any ads. Being a member helps, but I figured hey, if it’s a good experience anyway why not let you guys have some income from whatever it is you’re doing. It isn’t like some sites which will not be mentioned, those make me put up full shields.
So far, so good. Embrace the weird.
No ads here – Something is working!
Let’s get weird!
Oh, ah-ah-ah-ah
Get up, come on, get down with the weirdness
I will say that the ads seem more appropriate now. Thanks.
Honestly, I’m kinda a fan of inappropriate stuff, just not between 7:00am and 4:00pm on weekdays.
I started logging in more because I didn’t want to see all of the AI-exaggerated butts.
ew ew ew ew EW
I hate this era of nonconsensual slop so much. In a better world, that garbage would be banned, but alas, we live in hell and it appears in ads of all things.
I agree, I consider myself a first amendment maximalist but I don’t see why that would extend to generative AI, which isn’t a person. I don’t think it should be allowed to generate content like that at all.
Well the powers to be have already given corporations human rights so why not AI?
I’m waiting for the first AI to be executed in Texas.
They have executed many AL’s!