><i>“It’s only been a few days, but we haven’t seen any deterioration on our performance metrics,” Ms. Lemkau said in an interview on Tuesday.</i><p>The ephemeral "brand awareness" provided by most advertising takes more than a few days to fall off. Chase isn't going to get someone to open an account just because they saw a banner ad, their goal is to familiarize people with their name so that when someone wants to open a bank account Chase seems like an option. People are not going to forget about Chase bank...
What they conveniently leave out is what % of the total traffic on those 400K comes from the 5K remaining. It's a safe assumption that they stuck with the most popular mainstream sites so this could realistically be a <10% reduction in the number of eyeballs.
The existence of Patreon and similar services gives me hope that we can one day have a viable way to fund websites besides advertising. It seems like at present, one or two person teams (e.g. small podcasts and YouTube channels) can survive or even thrive on Patreon donations, mid-sized entities (e.g. major podcasts like Serial, most websites) rely on advertising, while large organizations like newspapers use some combination of advertising and subscriptions with mixed success. It would be great if Patreon-style donations could become a major revenue source of the mid-sized content producers as they have for the small.
Is there any research on the effectiveness of ads? I can’t ever remember intentionally clicking an ad on a webpage. I would imagine ads are more relevant or effective on an image feed like Instagram, but does anyone interact with ads on actual webpages? Or, worse, mobile games?
I wonder if it's advertised-selective.<p>That is, a mainstream product like chase works with mainstream sites. While the fake news / conspiracy sites might be good for the kinds of things that end up in my spam folder: get rich quick, penis enlargement, tax scams and the like?
> An intern then manually clicked on each of those addresses to ensure that the websites were ones the company wanted to advertise on.<p>why is it always the interns
“Surprisingly, the company is seeing little change in the cost of impressions or the visibility of its ads on the internet”<p>This is pretty significant.
Online advertising is toxic. Everything from the execution (code), the push, the presentation, the stalking, the need for isolation, and the horrid insecurity. I understand that ads are the life blood of much of the web, but so long as that is the case there are many sites I won't visit and just about everything else I will block ads.<p>The only site I frequently visit where I don't feel dirty and violated by ads are the video ads on YouTube because I know they are screened for in appropriate content and aren't littered with 30 spyware packages. Of course YouTube makes up for that with horrid ad/stalking behavior everywhere else.<p>I even bet Facebook would be an ethical company if not for all the behaviors associated with chasing ad revenue.