Error 402: Gone Native
We're back with another post in our ongoing series on web monetization, the Error 402 series. Before the holidays, we had talked about some of the earlier attempts at monetizing content, which included paywalls, banner ads, search ads, and eventually concepts around upselling into premium services under the banner of freemium." I originally was going to do the next entry in the series on other types of subscription models, but a few people raised other things that they wondered about, so this week and next I want to cover some of those.
Starting around 2010, there was a concerted effort to search out more alternatives to banner & search ads, including a concept called native advertising." Now, the very concept of native advertising predates the internet, as many early forms of newspaper and radio advertising could be seen as native," in that they were more closely integrated with the content itself. Things like the Texaco Star Theater" on radio and television, in which Texaco's sponsorship of the variety show was integrated throughout. Or even things like the Michelin Guide for suggesting good restaurants for motorists, further encouraging people to drive places (on Michelin tires).
The key part of such things is integrating the ad or sponsorship more closely with the content in a manner that doesn't seem intrusive or out of place, but still creates some level of brand recognition. Sometimes it works, in a manner where the sponsorship is actually beneficial and users are appreciative, but much more often (unfortunately) those ads turn into annoying advertorials" or misleading content in service of the advertisers.
On the internet there were many different ideas of how to create native" ads, some of which were more like advertorial content. For example, the NY Times famously (or infamously, depending on your standpoint) blurred the lines between sponsorship and editorial with some of its native content." A decade ago, they published a paid post" with shoemaker Cole Hahn called Grit & Grace." The content was made to look like an article about ballet dancers, but it was created and designed by the brand and placed on the NY Times website.
There were other forms of native" content, including some that I thought were promising. One form was something we even experimented with at Techdirt, which involved having brands ask questions of the Techdirt audience. I don't remember the exact examples, but it could be something like having a mobile phone company asking our audience what qualities and features they were most interested in for their mobile provider.
To me, that always seemed like a smart approach because it allowed the brand to get their name out there while getting real and honest feedback at the same time (which might be legitimately useful for the company). Unfortunately, we found the companies that provided the tools for running such programs kept quickly shifting away to more intrusive kinds of ads (at one point we had an unfortunate experience of having a partner that had been testing those useful kinds of approaches insert a pop up window on our site without telling us... and that was not cool).
Indeed, the failures we saw personally with the native ads that I was most interested in kind of highlighted where much of the market headed. With companies less willing to experiment with such innovative approaches to native" ads, many moved towards the model pioneered by Outbrain: what's sometimes known as chumboxes," in which boxes appear beneath articles suggesting other stories you may be interested in," or paid promoted stories" where the other stories" are off on sketchy websites, and are often nonsense clickbait, barely connected to reality, and (quite frequently) just plain disgusting.
Here's an example (my computer is so locked down against this nonsense, it took me a few tries to figure out how to even see it, but once I did, it wasn't hard to find):
These have become a staple of local news sites, but also often signal the kind of news site you shouldn't trust and should stay away from. Despite many companies pushing these types of ads on us (and hearing from other sites that they actually do pay well), we've always refused to run them on Techdirt, as they fundamentally seem annoying and awful for readers.
And that kind of demonstrates where native ads went wrong - and where many other kinds of ad programs like this go wrong. While they can start out as more serious attempts to create win-win" setups like what I described earlier, since the underlying focus is on getting paid for content, it opens itself up to sleazier and sleazier advertisers who are willing to pay more to get access to audiences, and thus the quality drops.
Frankly, it's still disappointing to me that no one really figured out an effectively non-awful setup for native ads, as I thought it could have real promise if done right. But, alas, we ended up with chumboxes.
The other area to explore, which will cover next week, is all the various attempts at micropayments.