You may have noticed that a few new ads are appearing on the site – a new tall one in the left-hand sidebar, a new long one in the footer, and a new square(ish) one after the first post on the front page and at the end of posts on their own pages. Now, we don’t like ads any more than you do. But the fact is that ads are one of the few ways we have of bringing in money, and we do need money to maintain and (hopefully) improve the site, as well as to help justify the many hours we spend working on it. So I hope you’ll tolerate the ads … in fact, I hope you’ll click through them when they look mildly interesting to you! Click-throughs help us look more appealing to advertisers, which helps us sell more and better ads, which helps us make the site better, which helps everyone.
As always, thank you so much for your support of BMG!
I will do this for you…
I don’t know that I like how the new ad space looks like it’s part of the post.
That’s easy to do.
Especially when the content of some of the ads aren’t very progressive. There’s an anti-union one that I’m seeing.
They come up on my RSS reader too. If some schmuck wants to spend money trying to convince me to support Palin/Gingrich/GOP or oppose unions/Obama/Patrick, I say let the fool part with his money!
Do you have any control over content? I get Deval ads all the time at Red Mass Group and Polito ads here, so my guess is no, but just curious.
Some of the ads are targeted to the site – so you will always see left leaning ads on BMG. But some ads target you as a user and what sites you’ve been on recently and what you’ve searched recently.
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p>So if you go to a lot of political web sites you can find Palin ads on BMG.
They already HAVE my cookies, email, etc. so what the hell?
Back to the margins with the advertisements. They make the page look cluttered and my own BMG experience less enjoyable.
so here is the big question: how much are you willing to contribute to the site in order to keep the objectionable ads away? Like I said, money is necessary. More advertising and free content is one model; less advertising and subscription income is another. How much would you pay for BMG?
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p>I’m quite serious about this question, by the way. I’d really like to hear your answer.
I was fine with margin ads and I suppose I can learn to tolerate top and bottom ads, but right in the middle of what I’m reading is what I object to. I don’t want to pay for BMG; my vote is for the status quo ante.
Heh. That is precisely the problem, isn’t it. The status quo ante is not really a viable model. Everyone wants good stuff for free; no one wants to pay for it; no one wants ads disrupting their enjoyment. Well, that’s why economists have bandied about concepts like the free-rider problem for many years.
where is BMG financing?
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p>a) historically and currently under water — the financial costs of server space, required software, etc exceeds revenue
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p>b) historically above water, but trending downward — we used to cover costs, but they’re rising faster than revenue and we’re worried about going under water
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p>c) we cover costs just fine. Indeed, the Editors want to make this more profitable.
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p>Now I’m not talking about magnitudes here, simply as compared to zero. So, for (c), I’m not suggesting that anybody will be rich — or even quit their day job — because of BMG revenue. Likewise, I don’t expect that the actual financial costs of BMG are particularly high.
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p>I’m also not intending to marginalize your efforts. Indeed, they’re massive, and I’m quite grateful. The Editors put tons of hours into this. They created the format, hustled to get it’s name out there, and constantly work to promote, to create their own (high quality!) posts and comments, and they deal with squabbles and other nonsense. All the time. The thing is, politics has a long tradition of not paying the pawns well. I don’t get paid to knock on doors or phone bank or stand at the polls or gin up support for a candidate or for my own posts, which I hope slowly move the vox populi in a more progressive direction.
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p>Finally, let us not forget that BMG did begin as a blog, with cost and revenue trends pretty clear and relatively unchanged since then. Just as I’m not shocked that you’re experimenting with advertising to deal with revenue, I’d expect that you’re not shocked about the financial cost side of things.
we are at (b) as of now. And that’s only if you assign zero value to the thousands of hours we’ve put into the site. If you even assign minimum wage to those hours, we’d be way, way under water.
I’m in favor or you guys getting paid to maintain this site. So I will cheerfully (well, maybe not cheerfully) tolerate the ads on the end of the diaries. I will even find a way to support organized labor to cancel out Peter’s support for regressing to John D Rockefeller’s labor relations.
I actually do assign zero to the thousands of hours that the editors and the posters put into the site. I chalk all of the folks who contribute brain waves and key strokes up as do-gooders, myself included.
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p>That written, I do think that you shouldn’t also have to pay out of pocket.
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p>And yeah, I use an AdBlocker. And yeah, I’d subscribe for life.
If your going to sell my brain space to advertisers, shouldn’t I get a share of that? It’s not like I consent to see everything that pops up in my browser, in fact, for the record, I do not consent to see any of it. I don’t even consent to leaving this comment, I feel coerced into it and lacking full information about what will happen if I do.
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p>One thing I wondered about advertising though: could it be taxed, or is there some sort of first amendment BS that says advertising is untaxable? I think it should be taxed at like 100%.
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p>Not if your contribution is worth nothing!
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p>You kind of set yourself up for that one. I merely finished it up.
But don’t miss my serious question: Is advertising something we could tax, for revenue?
but people do sell ads, just like people sell other things. And ads do have a social cost, and an environmental cost. I think if GM has enough money to film a pickup truck climbing a mountain and put it on the air three times every hour, then there must be some extra money there, and it would be better to collect a share of that in order to offset loss of revenue from less income and sales taxes. It’s not to increase revenue but to try to find the best revenue source.
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p>The media could still charge the same for the ads, but the companies would pay an additional tax.
so the more I seem worthless and impressionable the better, as far as the value of my brainspace is concerned. Now someone like you, a priori knowledgeable about everything, set in your ways, always right, impervious to argument, you’re worth nothing to advertisers. I bet you have never been influenced by advertising once, but maybe your wife is influenced once a week, so everything is both off-limits and ends up with you coming out on top anyway.
I’ll bet you’re a hit at parties too.
I’m fair game. Don’t talk about my family.
My intent was to be lighthearted and funny, but I missed my mark. I’ve upset you, and I apologize.
You gave your brain space to BMG, free of charge. By posting here you are giving up your rights to your words. Don’t believe me? Check the footer on every page: “All content © BMG Media Empire LLC. Some rights reserved.” And you’ll see, if you click through on “Some rights reserved”, that BMG very generously gives you a free license to your own words, to do with as you please, as long as you attribute those words (to whom, I’m not sure), don’t do it for money, and don’t alter those words.
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p>So if BMG sells ad space on these words that you are very generously giving to them, I don’t see that you have a lot of room for complaint.
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p>(Seriously, BMG Editors, is my summary actually correct? Is this copyright notice intended to claim copyright on words you three didn’t actually produce? What are the legal ramifications of me excerpting my own words if I posted them here first? Do I need to start putting my own copyright notice in my sig?)
Every major browser has free ad blocker extensions that do a pretty good job of eliminating or hiding ads on most sites. I have been using one for years and hardly ever see ads. While you can refuse to show content until an ad is downloaded, you can’t really force the browser to show it.
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p>As long as most people don’t install ad blockers, you are ok, but otherwise you would either have to reimplement the site using technology that is harder to block (like Flash), go with less effective text-based ads, or go to a subscription model.
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p>DailyKos lets you subscribe for life for 100$ (at least they used to) which lets you see the site without ads.
that’s very true. But shhh, don’t tell anyone! 😉
??? Pros anD cons?
I’ve been trying to brainstorm a bit. There are blogs with zero ads without subscription, but maybe those are smaller enterprises anyway. You could go the PBS route and solicit donations/pledges, maybe even from friendly politicians and their campaigns. Though I watch plenty of commercial TV I’ve always had a soft spot for PBS because of their minimal ads, though the trade-off is 15-minute pledge breaks during some primetime performing arts programs.
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p>I admit my reaction is somewhat in the visceral/kneejerk category. I get so tired of ads – in newspapers, often taking up most of a page; at ballfields, including naming rights; on public transit buses and trains that should be taxpayer-funded, interrupting my TV shows. Do I HAVE to see the efforts of someone trying to make a buk every time I turn around!
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p>OK, enough of the rant. Just get those ads away from smack in the middle of what I’m trying to read and I’ll be fine.
the square-ish ads after the first post on the front page and at the end of individual posts are the most profitable. Because they are the ones you are most likely to see. The fact that they annoy you the most is precisely the reason that they are the most effective.
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p>To your other comments:
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p>Yes, almost certainly. If you look around the ‘net, you’ll notice that virtually every site with significant traffic has ads all over it. The simple fact is that, if you want to get beyond the free blogspot-type sites, websites cost money to operate and improve.
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p>We could, and we’ve occasionally done that in the past. However, I will refer back to your own comment upthread: “I don’t want to pay for BMG; my vote is for the status quo ante.” So, there’s the problem with the donation/subscription model: it’s 100% voluntary. The combination approach seems much more likely to succeed. As for soliciting campaigns, we have avoided that because it creates obvious conflict of interest problems. (We have of course run ads purchased by campaigns, but we have not solicited them.) And don’t fool yourself that PBS doesn’t sell ads! They just run them at the beginning or end of the show, not during.
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p>Yup. Welcome to America. 😉
They do stay afloat and they’re also on my list of things I would donate to when I one of these days have more disposible income. Even the “ads” (and they still somehow don’t seem as obnoxious as other commericial TV ads) at the beginning and end are often for causes, or at least directly relate to the show’s content. Plus as you point out they are at the beginning and end (the “margins” if you will) of the show, which I can turn off early and ignore. Advertising has just gotten way out of hand, IMO, especially when entities that are supposed to be public start relying on them for revenue.
I have no idea about the legalities, but could you set it up so that any person, organization, political entity, etc who donated was “anonymized” so that nobody could figure out who gave the money, yourself included? If you put it on a random-ish time delay, you could even remove the possibility of money flowing when you covered specific topics, thereby giving feedback about which blognews is profitable…
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p>That allows money to come in without any conflict of interest, no?
unless it’s cash left in a satchel at North Station. Obviously we couldn’t take checks or credit cards that way. Even PayPal comes with at least some identifying information, though I suppose someone could set up an anonymous-looking PayPal account and send us money that way. Frankly, though, I’d be uncomfortable with that – I want to know where the money is coming from. If that means we’re conflicted out of soliciting ads from campaigns, so be it. (And, as I said before, we have accepted ads from campaigns – we just haven’t actively solicited them.)
Surely, a trustworthy intermediary could be used to collect the money. I’m neither banker nor accountant, so I don’t have a feel for details, but it certainly seems possible.
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p>Why do you want to know where the money is coming from? In other words, if somebody came up with a $100 donation to BMG Enterprises because he was sympathetic to your danger of going under water, would you simply reject it because it was anonymous, or would you throw it in the kitty?
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p>You’re taking ads now, but my bet is that they’re not direct ads — they’re coming through a clearinghouse (google, whatev). That means that you don’t know form where the money is coming, certainly not beforehand and perhaps, depending on the ad, not afterward either.
Way, way too much trouble IMHO. If we were talking heaps of money, maybe. For the small potatoes we’re actually dealing with, not worth it. The analogue I can think of is that judges often set up blind trusts when they go onto the bench so that they don’t have to sell off their investments to avoid conflicts of interest, but our doing something like that seems absurd.
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p>Why do I want to have an idea of where the money is from? Because I don’t like the idea of totally anonymous funders supporting the site. I don’t know what their motivations are; I don’t know what or who they represent; and there are lots of folks whose money I’d refuse.
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p>As for the clearinghouse point, you’re right about the Google ads, though you’re not right about the blogads (those are sold ad by ad, and we have control over whether we accept or reject them). And I suppose it would be possible for someone to scam Google ads by, say, buying an ad that doesn’t actually represent what they believe. (E.g., a front for the KKK buys an ad promoting racial harmony.) If someone really wants to buy Google ads that way, I can’t stop them … but the harm seems a lot more remote than my taking money directly from someone about whom I know nothing.
As I entered the thread, Jeff had ads top, bottom, middle and sides!
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p>Any reason WHY Glodis, Bump, Lake, and your varied Congressional AREN’T advertising here? Just posting as a weird form of ‘earned media’?
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p>HeY Keating! O’Leary! Jeff is EATING YOUR LUNCH!
that removes everything from the text–I see only a little bit on the margins, I could be perfectly happy with your need to increase revenue. I would, however, also be perfectly happy to pay a subscription fee to help defray costs. Free riders are a huge problem, and as the internet matures, they will find themselves outside the loop or coughing up some bucks. There’s no way around it–and there really shouldn’t be.
the past few days. With all the time you spend on posting and maintaining the site it would be good if you didn’t have to pay out of pocket. Hopefully this helps.
Do we all get the same advertisements? I’ve recently been looking for a new site for coffee beans and when signing on this morning I got a Coffee for Less ad.
it’s just standard Google ads, which I think are affected by your own browsing habits as well as the content of the page.
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p>However, we anticipate that that will change fairly soon.
I, for one, will happily pay a modest monthly, quarterly, or annual fee in exchange for no ads, where “modest” is on the order of $10/month (or $25/quarter or $100/year). I have no particular problem with the new ads, I’m just saying that I value the site (far more than the above prices, by the way), and I’m perfectly willing to pay for that value.
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p>If you do go in the direction of collecting subscription revenue, I think it’s important that there be no way of discerning, from the site, who pays and who doesn’t.
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p>Another option is to provide a “contributor” or “sponsor” program, along the lines of PBS or the Symphony, where people or organizations can make larger contributions and be recognized (if the donor wishes).