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54 Responses to “FAQ: What’s with the ads on LP?”
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Yes they are really crap ads and I’d never click on any of ‘em. But what the fuck it’s free money. Another six months of that and you’ll make enough to buy the LP readership a watery bundy and coke. With several thousand straws.
Being politically opposed to poms I’ll take mine as a scotch & ooke.
First Prof Q cuts his hair, then this. Whatever happened to the 60’s, man…?
I don’t trhink they’re slowing the site down, which was my only concern. As to ehether I’d click on them: well, apart from clicking on to a couple of ads the first tim ew I got on the net, out of curiousity. I’ve never clicked on internet ads anywhere, anyplace, anytime.
You don’t need to click on them. They’re not the same as google ads. It’s display advertising not pay for view.
Two words: Adblock Plus
Will there be transparency regarding how much (or little) the ads bring in?
Surely this would be a way to ward off criticism regarding the harnessing of participant labour for turning a profit ala web 2.0 business models of commercialising amateur labour. There are plenty of blogs out there with similar content but what makes LP worth reading and engaging with is the ‘conversation’ (as j_p_z describes it).
Perhaps these conversations already go on in the quasi-private realm of the LP Facebook or Yahoo groups. What is needed is a permanent page that indexes daily or weekly how much (or little) money is flowing and various other stats.
Glen - I’d have thought if it’s to be run as a business then that information is quite properly kept private.
Question: do you get paid for hits alone, or hits where the ad gets loaded into someone’s browser (i.e. they’re not blocking ads)?
I’m not sure, FDB.
1. In broad terms, how will the money be used to achieve this aim?
2. Where is the rest of the money going?
There is some merit in glen’s proposal of transparency, but I wonder if it would be practical to publish that information? It certainly seems relevant to an LP ‘constituency’ who contribute to the success of the blog by participating in threads to have access to such information, but given the informal nature of this kind of participation, how could that information be made accessible without also being accessible to the general public? Also, what are the potential effects of making that information accessible?
I’m not really comfortable with the idea of formalising participation through registration either, which is the simplest way of offering transparency to participants.
I insist that any funds raised be properly accounted for and spent appropriately on responsible carousing, transparent frittery and well-planned bingeing.
This vital task demands a whole-of-blog approach, and to this end I expect a Joint Committee to be established. Ahem.
If I had to pasy to register to use LP, I’d stop contributing.
maeant pay. So upset at the very idea of it, I mispelt. (Not mispoke.)
Is this being run as a business? Simply being run as a ‘business’ is no reason (or excuse, if you want to use loaded language) to keep things ‘private’. ‘Business’ being a code word for capitalist enterprise organised around extracting surplus value from some activity or another.
I don’t comment on for-profit sites. There is no way in hell my labour is going to be used to produce surplus value for non-collective purposes. I would be extremely disappointed if LP is being run on a business model — the purpose of which is to produce a profit — rather than in a collective fashion.
Mark and others have always stated that the purpose of fund-raising activities is for site maintenance and for some modest return to pay for the time put into writing posts and what not (post which allow for the discussion that makes LP popular). This is fair enough,a dn I think most people would agree. Why shouldn’t this be transparent? Or is this maintenance/modest return model not the model anymore? Has it become commercialised?
Perhaps in business circles such questions (regarding the transparency of the extraction of surplus value) aren’t asked, or are even regarded as somehow being rude (hence the use of ‘properly in FDB’s response). On an allegedly left-wing blog however, such questions are not rude, they should be expected, if not encouraged and anticipated. I don’t even comment as much as other people, yet in my limited participation I find these question necessary. Not because of my investment in this site and community, limited it may be, but because LP can take the initiative and demonstrate other ways of allowing capital to circulate in these owener-instigated, but participant-driven web 2.0 websites. I expect better from the LP Collective.
BTW, just so I am not a complete leech or critical asshole, see Steve Shaviro on Jonathan Beller’s book “The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle” for a Marxist engagement that I think is useful for understanding the eyeballs-for-cash model of these online advertisements.
Glen, I think it is possible to define business in a way that leaves open the question of profit. My partner runs a not-for-profit organisation - a long daycare centre - which is nevertheless a business and is run as such. There is just no question of turning a profit, and where there is a budget surplus it is re-invested in resources for the kids.
1. Possibly through advertising/marketing in places where there might be some crossover of interests - ie Crikey, and also through efforts to promote the blogosphere generally which are still under discussion by the blogs participating in this project.
2. That question was answered in the original post to which I linked.
Paul, I don’t know why you would think that anyone had to pay to contribute to LP. Perhaps you’ve misunderstood glen’s argument, but there’s never been any suggestion of that. None. If glen chooses to regard commenting on this site as a form of labour, that’s his view, but it’s not one whose premises I necessarily share.
Well, sorta.
This implies you’ll be aiming either to pay yourself a salary or to pay yourself part of the surplus that remains after expenses and promotional expenditure.
I’m sure you understand that taking a salary and appropriating part of the surplus are not the same.
One implies acting as an agent of an entity, the other implies proprietorship of that entity.
Geez firefox is a treat. I had no idea there were ads on this site until this post.
“If glen chooses to regard commenting on this site as a form of labour, that’s his view, but it’s not one whose premises I necessarily share.”
This is an interesting question, although perhaps, given the amount of advertising revenue involved and the existing division of labour - ie where Mark and other contributors do most of the work for no remuneration - a question that will only become important if the advertising revenue turns out to be more than what the contributors time is worth. I’m willing to bet it isn’t even close.
Paul may also have read my comment above where I suggested that registration was a way that stakeholders could be identified and provided with relevant information in aid of transparency, although not one I liked the idea of.
Klaus,
You got it right. Fair spooked me, mate.
Everyone, now happily reassured and ready to chortle away at the vicissitudes of Australian politics, things, stuff, ertc., as usual.
Well, personally if the LP collective want to run ads on their site and it returns them a bit of revenue I don’t give a damn and think it is entirely reasonable given the amount of time and effort put into the blog.
I also don’t think it is anyone’s business but their own how much revenue is generated or how it is used.
Good luck, folks.
Katz, it’s the latter. I don’t intend to become an employee of LP.
The basic choice I face is whether I continue to do this stuff or not. I’m currently earning less than $500 before tax a week from sessional teaching. Given the financial commitments I have, this is unsustainable. I earn a small amount from paid writing, and I’m not actually prepared to disclose how much, but it might typically pay the rent - literally - in an average month. No more. I could do more, but I also need to finish my PhD, and the days when I had a scholarship are gone. I probably could reasonably earn an income a fair bit higher than the median wage, if I so chose, but because I’ve so chosen, I’m earning an income a fair bit lower than the median wage. I can either keep doing this and make a buck from it, or stop doing it and make bucks from doing something else. Continuing to devote so much time to this for nothing is just not an option any more.
That’s as far as I’m going to go with regard to disclosure.
As to the revenue raised, it’s $9 per 1000 ad impressions. How much that adds up to will depend on the number of views per month. At the moment I don’t know what that is - as we don’t have a stats program installed. It will be as measured by Google analytics. I’m not sure I want to report publicly on page views, because having done so in the past, I’ve found that it sometimes leads to a bit of grief in terms of comparisons that people inevitably want to make. I might have contributed to that myself by making some comparisons that weren’t based on the best data because I didn’t really understand the various ways to measure readership as well as I should have at the time, and for that I apologise. But the short answer is that I don’t know, and currently have no way of knowing, how many page views LP gets.
It may well be that this will not prove sustainable as a source of income for me, and if so, I’ll have to rethink my blogging future within a couple of months, I should think. But I think it’s worth a try, as I’d rather be doing this than something else.
End of story - I really don’t want to debate this any further for reasons that should be reasonably obvious.
I wasn’t trying to pry into the figures Mark.
I was simply interested in how LP had opted to map its financial structure with its editorial structure.
There comes a time in all labours of love that are transmuted into money-making ventures when choices have to be made.
I think that your choice is appropriate and I wish you luck with the venture.
Thanks, Katz.
I would have to disagree with that Pollytickedoff, if (and only if) there was profit involved. As glen rightly points out, it would change the attitude of some commentors here regarding their participation. As to Mark and other contributors drawing money for their time, I think that is only right, so this becomes an issue only at the point where more money is being made than their time is worth. A quick estimate suggests that this isn’t going to happen in the near future, if at all, so it’s not an issue in that sense, but I don’t hold to the idea that their should be no questions about transparency.
Klaus, I’ve tried to be as transparent as possible in the penultimate comment I posted.
Mark, I think that’s further than you needed to go in terms of disclosure. My position was only on the need for discussing this, and I’m a little embarrassed now, because for me the question was really an abstract one.
Sell outs! Corporate whores! Betrayal! they scream..
Joking, good luck, Im an infrequent commentor but very frequent lurker, and if you make a million bucks from this thing there would still be nothing but praise from me. Keep up the great work.
Katz,
What sort of transparency ARE you suggesting? You know the ads are there, you know some revenue is being generated - how much more do you want to know?
BTW Mark, re “per 1000 ad impressions” do you know how they measure this? Is it based on visits to LP or visits to different threads. Just interested to know if I should try and visit even if I don’t have time to read
This discussion is veering towards the personal, but I don’t think that is the right framework for thinking about this. Mark has offered sound reasons for moving to advertising, but that is not transparency, and getting more specific about those reasons is beside the point.
Transparency for me means stating what kind of entity LP is, and being committed to updating that statement if circumstances change. That doesn’t necessarily involve producing figures for advertising revenue, hours worked or anything that detailed, and as I suggested above there are practical questions that may mean that transparency is simply too much to ask.
Klaus K,
That should have been Klaus not Katz. Sorry, Klaus K!
Your last post says nothing meaningful to me in regards to what you think ‘transparency’ is. So what would you expect the “what kind of entity LP is, and being committed to updating that statement if circumstances change” would include?
By the way, returning to practical questions, I’ve just confirmed that if you block the ads, you block the revenue.
Page views is the basis for it - so if you refresh or return to another thread, it should be another impression.
That means, if you’re using Firefox and running Flashblock (like me), it’s probably nice to check the “allow flash from this site” for LP. There is no way in hell that I’m ditching flashblock though.
I use ABP, which I’ve just disabled just for this site. Basically, the ad server doesn’t work on any stats we might report to it (for understandable reasons!) but counts an impression for each time it successfully serves an ad. So obviously if something blocks the ad server, it doesn’t count.
I was wrong about Google analytics - I sought some clarification on that and it’s just that it gives you a better approximation of what the Nielsen Net ratings count is than stat servers. I’ve also been just informed that we do have a stats program installed on the new server, and FWIW, these are the stats for the last fourteen days:
80371 524286 1463600 20.27 GB
That’s visits, pages, hits and bandwidth served.
About 30% of browsers are Firefox so imagining that most of those will have an ad blocker installed, that should probably be factored in.
I’m also unsure of what discrepancy will exist between the server stats and Google analytics. There will be one.
The server stats do exclude robots and crawlers from the count.
Pollytickedoff, the way I see it is that it could be as simple as confirming that it’s a not-for-profit organisation (and I note this is mentioned on the ‘About’ page), and having a formal statement about advertising revenue. Questions about who owns and who gets paid, and the nature of that payment. I mean, is writing a post voluntary and unpaid? Will there be scope posters to be paid a gratuity? Not all organisations have to disclose this, and I’m not necessarily saying that LP should either as it may be impractical, or involve too much formalisation.
Personally, I trust Mark and the rest of the LP crew totally, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be transparent to newcomers, and that as these things change we shouldn’t be informed. In this sense it could be a model for others conducting such an enterprise.
Klaus, it just occurred to me that it would be a good idea to add something to the “About” pages - since obviously this thread won’t be on the sidebar forever, so it would make sense to have an FAQ and I’ll be consulting with the rest of the collective on what should go in it, and will certainly take the comments on this thread into account.
I should also note that I think I’ve picked up an eye infection (fingers crossed it’s not but it’s a bit yucky at the moment) and looking at a computer screen isn’t doing me any good at all so if I don’t respond to further comments and if I’m away from here for a while, that’ll be why!
In light of that information, I’ve disabled ad-blocker for this site and a couple of others, and encourage others to do so for other sites that they support.
Advertising!
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Yikes! Evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil evil!!!!
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Sellouts!
What’s your occupation again, Adrien?
You deserve anything extra you can earn here Mark. Love this site, just keep up the good work.
Many thanks, Debbieanne, I’m really pleased you appreciate LP!
Has your techie done anything about possibly optimising the site’s markup to slightly (or substantially) reduce your bandwidth overheads? Or, for instance, offloading static files like images and CSS to a distributed content host like Amazon’s S3? That could cut costs a bit.
Not sure, Nick, will pass on the suggestion.
Thanks!
I know Mark I know.
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So I know what I’m talking about. Someone was talking about Bill Hicks - [link]
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He’s right. We all deserve to die.
Go nuts I say. Last time I checked ethics didn’t pay the bills!
Tell that to Peter Singer.
Interesting thread, and an interesting dilemma with which I can seriously relate!
The best idea would be to change your politics, Mark. I’m sure that if you wanted to embrace the right-wing vision of corporatised government you would have no trouble growing this site into a profitable enterprise. Tim Blair has already claimed the snarky, low-brow space, but there’s a big opening for a more intellectualized version (if such a thing is possible).
Assuming that’s not gonna happen, you are probably stuffed.
Ozblogistan today just doesn’t seem to support the readership numbers which would make a blog like this pay for itself (in terms of hours spent v. having a life). I see only two possibilities: either bring in new readership, or get the site sponsored by a modern-day Medici Family.
With regards to new readership, one path to financial stability would be to start breaking real news on this site, and thereby become a part of the MSM “story”. Consider Drudge or Josh Marshall’s TPM as a model. OTOH this is something Crikey! has been trying to do for some time, without much luck. Perhaps if there are any senior whistle-blowers out there who would like to contribute some exciting tidbits to LP via email….???
The other option I see is some kind of altruistic sponsorship by a reader with deep pockets. Anyone got Dick Smith’s mobile number? Sadly for the strength of our democracy, there are not many wealthy Australians with that sort of attitude. You could always apply for a government Arts grant, but my understanding is that it would take about three weeks just to fill in the forms…
I know, Gandhi. Wouldn’t we all like to spend more time reading blogs and less time working.
If it weren’t for capitalism and the tyranny of markets, the business plan would make sense.
Well, I’m not sure what your point is but I do think blogs like this one serve a social purpose, particularly where the corporate media is repeatedly compromised.
“Well, I’m not sure what your point is ….”
Good question Gandhi.
Jinmaro has the measure of Liam - he is an apologist for every action of the priviledged or those ” involved ” in ownership of power positions in the self elected elite of the left wing collective.
The party line is declared and Liam fronts the barricades denouncing the splitters.
His moniker of President for Life isn’t a joke.
Interesting dilemma. Like some others using Firefox, I had no idea there were ads until I read this post.
Obviously I really want LP to keep going.
Equally, I have no desire to see ads on teh intarwebz, even on LP.
Am I allowed to keep reading even if I block the ads?
Yes, Peter!