"Daring Fireball does it" has to be the worst possible comparison imaginable. Gruber has super differentiated, high editorial value content that folks will pay a premium to put their message next to. Imgur is about as far away from that as possible. They have to try to make money, it's crazy to sit here and think you know better than they do on this. Don't you think if they could make enough money doing what you think, they would do that instead? They are in a tough industry. They host images (relatively expensive), they have almost no user information for targeting, most visitors never come back to a page again, and most of the content posted is super low value. Unfortunately, this is the result.
I wish an image service existed that did some image recognition on the picture and provided you with relevant, but subtle 'Learn more about this thing' links.
Oh yes. I run a image hosting service and adsense cant serve any relevant ads because the page hardly contains any text. The only text they identify is 'image hosting' and start serving ads to competitors T_T. My service has more information about user interest though based on topics and other user interactions etc but there is no way to forward these hints to adsense :(
Any tips on ad providers that support more explicit choice of topic per page load?
Hey, yes! If reverse image search is possible now, it should be easy to automatically give credit to original creators, connect them with audiences and bypass blogspam!
I was referring to the way that DaringFireball does ads. I was not talking about any other aspect of DaringFireball.
If Imgur wants ads, there is a way to make ads sane and still make money.
For what anecdotes are worth, DaringFireball’s method is about the only form of ads that has ever worked on me. I actually read what he says about these companies, and I often am curious enough to go learn more. And he’s charging a lot for these ad placements for a week.
Whereas, I have never, ever been interested in something that tried to use trickery to pop up in my face, play audio, play animations, steal my clicks or otherwise force me to acknowledge its existence before continuing. I can’t even remember what those products were; I can only remember the speed at which I searched for a black "X" button to close the things.
The way that Daring Fireball does ads is a product of the entire way that Gruber runs the site - you can't only talk about ads. Not to mention the point that Gruber can do whatever he wants with his site and does not need to maximize revenue or provide a venture-scale return. He certainly makes a lot of money with ads the way they're set up - he could certainly make more with "better" ads. He deserves a lot of credit for valuing his readers so highly.
Can you point to a single Imgur-like property using the sort of ads you cite to generate any kind of significant revenue to the point where they could possibly offer a return on venture cash? I don't know of a single major web property running that style of ads that does so successfully. In fact, we see progressively worse ads are what publications are choosing to run instead (looking at you WaPo, running inline "videos" on mobile that are really huge GIFs). I agree that it sucks - certainly no argument there. But I am unaware of anywhere where what you're suggesting is working competitively with unobtrusive options.
I just want to chime in with a simpler answer. That's not really how Internet ads work. Ad deals between companies are fairly large and complex, at least the kind that are going to support a site like imgur.
Content is king and imgurs content is random and most likely junk. There's no consistency you could sell to a partner where'd they be willing to pay enough to allow something like DaringFireball does to work. The only way they're making enough is to put the junk we're dealing with now.
If you Google 'DF Sponsorship' you can get all the info (&rates). I believe a weekly sponsorship is about $13k and he does $15k-20k per podcast across 3-4 ad reads.
Gruber has done more to get high-level Apple people talking publicly answering unscripted questions than maybe anyone else in the media. Read him, learn from him, and like him or not, that's up to you, but at least respect what the guy has done.
