I have a pretty weird idea and I'm wondering if it is technically feasible: advertising is in my opinion poison for the mind and I avoid it where I can. At the same time I use lots of sites and services that are ad powered and I am blocking ads knowing full well that I deprive these providers from a revenue stream. But ads are just too obnoxious.
Would it be possible to create a service that serves up 'blank' content (let's call it 'whitespace') in every ad spot on the sites that you visit but that uses the same mechanism as the ad delivery services. So instead of advertisers buying up the space I would buy up the space on the sites that I visit creating a revenue stream that is as good or better than the one that advertisers would offer, effectively crowding them out.
OpenRTB or something like that would be a good start to inject this because you could essentially become your own agency there but I'm not sure how easy it would be to qualify for bidding on a large enough segment to make it worth your while. And on the off chance that an alternative channel would try to deliver ads anyway that could simply be blocked.
So, what's your judgment, is this a viable proposition or not, and if not why not?
And if it were available would you use it?
I would use a service that replaced all personalized ads with display ads however.
Display ads are targeted to the content, not the consumer. Higher quality content attracts quality audiences, and commands higher prices per impression. This creates a financial incentive to create quality content instead of SEO spam and clickbait.
Also, in my experience, display ads tend to be more relevant than personalized ads, but I regularly clear cookies, etc. I suspect people like me are a larger percentage of the addressable market than advertising networks admit.
The big G tried this, but seems the site is no longer available
Assuming it’s a good idea people will use, you’ll run into a couple issues:
1. To build this you have to break a lot of privacy rules. You’d need to tie and individual user to all of their individual impressions (ad slots they viewed) on every site/page. Because you’re billing them for the ad slots, you need to track and store their behavior, and be able to tie it to individual auctions. Privacy and technical difficulties everywhere.
2. Digital advertising is wildly complicated. You’d need to outbid every single other advertiser on every single impression. Because auction are first price now (rather than second price) it’s going to be ridiculously expensive to accomplish this. At work I have advertisers with some impressions where we bid $200+ cpm. ($0.20 per ad slot, so some page views would cost $1+).
3. This could actually work if you didn’t guarantee 100% coverage and just said like “reduce ads on pages by 33% while still paying pubs”. Then you build an audience segment of all your customers and just go to any dsp and bid on that segment until you reach the profit margin you want. Bill customers an average or just a monthly subscription to avoid tiring individual users to each of their impressions. (Although your creative will get denied/flagged because you must have accurate branding in the creative and it must clickthrough to that same brand’s site)
4. This will probably be impossible after 2024ish when cookies are gone.
5. Users you do this probably clear their cookies or use the global opt out, which would make your system not work.
You’re gonna need a team of engineers, lawyers, sales people, accountants and bankers…plus a shit load of capital.
However, i imagine over time there will be a centralization of these subscription manager services - we'll call them "middle men" - and over time they will squeeze ever more fees from brands/content destinations...and over time brands who gain enough market power will feel these middle men lack enough value to give them their fees, etc. you know, that old chestnut.
Or...maybe i totally misunderstood your idea. ;-)
But Youtube has something like 20 million premium subscribers - I'm one myself with a family plan. But that is against an estimated 2.6 billion active users. Like, 1%? Round up and call it 2%.
I wonder how many of those 2% of users are the most attractive and desired targets of advertisers?
OTOH, if you said to me you had a service that would bid like 1% more for the adspace on any site or service I consume and that $X00 per year would remove all ads from those sites or service I use . . . I'd buy that.
Putting on my blackhat for a minute. I'm a creator with some small percentage of consumers "opting out" via this type of tool - how can I buy ads on my site/service at an inflated price to optimize my income . . . if I know 2% of my users are willing to pay X+1% shouldn't I try to drive up X? Arbitrage?
My CTR would be terrible on empty space, so in the future what metrics would I report to advertisers to let them know how effective their ads would be? Plus, I wouldn't be confident you could keep your business going indefinitely so I'd likely end up having to sell to advertisers again in the future. So I'll just keep showing ads because I know I can sell ad spaces to someone. There's only one person who wants to buy empty space (you).
I definitely think it is viable. Execution is going to be hard.
Brave does something similar to what you are saying and they've struggled to gain enough traction in practice.
…Amazon AWS comes to mind.
There will be very few content creator who will benefit, most of them won't. This has a massive scalability problem.