Hey everyone, your old pal Matt here. As the publisher of The Autopian, it’s my job to make sure we have enough money to operate. One of the ways we do that is with advertising. Another way we do that is with membership. As a journalist and a fan of all the writers here, I much prefer the membership route to random display ads.
Last week, I went to a conference as a guest focused on ad tech. It was quite the eye-opening experience. I’ll explain my reasoning in a minute, but the general conclusion I came to was that we probably need to be a little more dynamic with our ads for non-members, and we should definitely work harder to make the experience much better for paying members.
That means we’re turning off autoplay on videos for members right now. If you’re a logged-in member and are reading a post, it’s your choice if you want the video to play or not. We’re now merging our Instagram content with our video offerings on mobile and otherwise experimenting with how to make the player more useful for everyone. Because we produce a lot of Instagram videos, this has fit nicely into our routine. On desktop, feeding the player mostly requires putting up more 16×9-oriented videos, and we’ve been slow to do that (thus, if you come here often, there’s a lot of repetition).
The way these players work is that they need to have high visibility in order to actually make money (this is why non-members get a player that follows them around the page). The best way to ensure high visibility, I believe, is to have great content that matches what you’re reading. We’re doing ok at that, but could be better. The other way to do it, and the way used by basically every website on the planet, is to autoplay the video. Ad tech people hope you like the video being shown, but they need you to watch a bunch of ads, or they don’t make any money.
I want us to make money. In addition to being sustainable, I think media can be a good business if more power is put into the hands of the creators. I want to prove this. Doing so means taking power away from those who merely see content as something to be optimized and monetized, and not actually enjoyed. We’re extremely lucky that everyone here believes in what we’re doing both editorially, as well as seeing the big commercial potential, and that the two are connected.
This is another step we’re taking to show that readers, when given a choice, will support publications that build community and listen to them. Members complained about the autoplay, so for now it’s off. If you’re not a member, seeing the ads is a part of how you contribute, but the way this works, you’d have to read thousands of articles to provide as much monetary backing as becoming a member at the lowest annual level.
If you like to read this site and are not a member, but want to become one (or you let your membership expire): click this link or add the coupon code noplay to your membership purchase, and I’ll give you $10 off any annual plan. That means for less than $ 4 a month, or a cup of very cheap coffee, you can support the Autopian by becoming a Cloth Annual member.
Either way, thank you for being here!
Top photo: depositphotos.com
I’m a member, so this doesn’t apply here, but I have a question: I use autoplay blockers (the internet is almost unusable without it). Does that make any difference to you, the guys running the website, or does this affect only the ad companies?
I mean, I’m not a monster, I do add exceptions to the adblocker on sites I support, but I never considered that the autoplay might have the same effect.
Somehow I never had autoplay on videos here, and I’m a low end member (vinyl, I think). Not sure why, but I’m okay with it.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Awesome! This is a great move!!
This was the only thing keeping me from signing up. Will now gladly be paying for a membership. And am really looking forward to not being inundated with videos. Thanks for continually trying to make this a better place!
This is fan-freakin-tastic!!
I’ll just say, for anyone on the fence, that the site staff frequently solicit opinions, communicate a lot of behind the scenes decisions, and actively listen to the members to work to make the site even better. The member party room over on the Discord has some great discussions. If you enjoy this site and can support this team by becoming a member, I highly recommend it.
Love you guys! Seriously, membership and supporting you all is worth every penny.
I don’t know if this is in response to my question on the previous article, but either way thanks for answering it. 🙂
Oh my god, thank you!
Thank you!!!
I love this update and stopping the auto play videos. If your not a member yet, just do it! It’s cheap, it supports the greatest automotive community on the webs, and the yearly swag is really nice. I was really excited when this site lauched and told many of my like minded (lunatic) friends to check it out. After three years, I’m still excited and glad to be a little piece of it.
Thank you, please come again.
Definitely appreciate it. I know I’m just Cloth tier, but I hope it offsets the couple pennies I assume you get if I were to view an ad instead. I subscribe to aftermath.site (shoutout ex-G/O Media staff!) and also have like $40/mo is Patreon subscriptions so I do try to support as many creators as I can.
I am clicking through more articles now. Previously, I would only click if it seemed likely to be worth the hassle of finding and pausing that fucking video.
This is fantastic, and I imagine I’m not the only one clicking through more now.
Cool! Great idea!
Yay!
Awesome! This will certainly make my work browsing experience much better. 🙂
Oh my god. Thank you. I will now actually turn off my ad blocker when I’m on here.
Site says noplay coupon code is not valid
Uh oh, lemme see if I can fix that.
Try it again? I just reset it.
Still not valid. In fact, on the desktop, when I follow the link you provide there isn’t even a place to enter the code. Seems to be mobile-only? But still says invalid code on mobile.
Wow, I mentioned how much I dislike the autoplay videos that now force a timeout to let me hit the pause button just yesterday and bam! Fixed!
I care a lot more about not seeing ads and autoplaying videos than I do about merch or other membership perks, so I am very happy about this! Thank you so much Matt!
BTW, my guess (and this would be interesting to hear about later) is that this news will create a small spike in membership that will more than offset any reduction in ad revenue. Something to think about.
Quick! What else don’t you like?
TIL that auto-playing videos of your own content somehow makes you money? Maybe what I actually learned today is that I don’t understand internet advertising at all. Can I post and then rewatch a video I took of a squirrel in my backyard and have money show up in my bank account???
That’s kinda confusing me as well.
there are ads between videos
I think it drives engagement to other posts, meaning it drives ad views on other pages.
Let the autoplay play and you will see that there are ads every few seconds.
I don’t know how it works for every site, but I believe YouTube has started to include watch time as a big part of their algorithm. That’s why you see so many multiple hour long compilation videos from long-time channels these days.
I’m not sure whether that directly affects ad revenue or if it just makes videos more likely to be recommended (and thus more likely to be watched, leading to more ad revenue indirectly), but I assume a similar thing is happening here.
Which is stupid, because a few seconds of autoplay video should not count as a positive when it comes to advertising, but that’s how the system works.
It’s to do with the infinite ad (bubble) economy. Someone is willing to pay you more money for an ad or even just an ad vector than it costs you in bandwidth and hosting, or costs your edge provider who then charges you for bandwidth and hosting.
There is an entire portion of the economy that doesn’t depend on the actual exchange of goods or services, only the promise and premise of showing people advertisements (hence the bubble aspect) that might then at some infinitesimal rate convert into a sale of some good or service.
[apologies if came off snarky or haughty, I am just trying to be mostly matter-of-fact with a heavy dollop of hatred for advertisements]
I am also one of the “I hate autoplay anything”, but have been accepting of it here because how much I value this site. I am glad being a paying member gets me a little reprieve from the autoplay, but at the same time (as someone who just survived round 2 of mass layoffs) I am okay with autoplay for members if it means the site continues to exist and all the writers stay employed.
I’d love to subscribe, but as a Canadian I believe I have to subscribe to the Vinyl Foreign Legion, which inexplicably costs $25/year more, coming in at an eye watering $175CAD.
In the meantime, I’ll try to view enough ads to offset my snarky comments.
You can subscribe at the Cloth level if you’re Canadian, there’s no foreign legion. Sorry if that’s confusing.
That certainly makes things better.
The only videos I can tolerate is David or Jason doing their crazy stuff (insert chainsaw sound)
That’s because you haven’t seen any videos of me yet.
Well, we’re waiting…
Why does this feel more like a threat than anything?