It's not discretely at the bottom of the page or off to the side. It's smack dab in the center of their page. As I was scrolling through articles I was forced to consider Norvo Nordisk.
From NPR:
- The world of digital sponsorship is changing rapidly, and many publishers are choosing to blur the lines between editorial and advertising. At NPR, we fundamentally think it is critical for our audience, our sponsors, and our editorial integrity that this distinction remains completely clear.
Several times a month, a new space, we are calling 'Center Stage,' will replace our standard sponsorship banners and display just below our top news stories on the NPR.org home page. Unlike on other news sites, this larger style of sponsorship will never overlap editorial content, and we will always clearly note the sponsorship nature of the space.
The ad looks very much like the rest of the page and could easily be confused as editorial content. I have nothing against Norvo Nordisk, but while scrolling through the home page of a site I help pay for both as a tax payer and with my own personal donations, I'd rather not have to encounter this.
Calling the place where you place your "ads" center stage also tells me what's important to you as a site. How about we continue to put the journalism and editorial content center stage?!
Oh, and bring back Neal Conan and Talk of the Nation while you're at it.
End rant
1. Honestly, anything they can do to make money I will accept with equanimity.
2. I think I trust NPR to pick their advertisements. I'm fine with them giving center stage to World Hemophilia Day, for example. That's not too far off of them just running a story on the impacts of hemophilia.
1. No way. That's what separates them from the others, it's a dangerous path and the analogy of the boiling frog comes to mind. Slowly, inch by inch they're all secretly chasing buzz feed's numbers.
2. They gave "center stage" to Norvo Nordisk by way of World Hemophilia Day, don't kid yourself.
It's a dangerous path? What's dangerous is that NPR will be finished without better funding. If the alternative is goodbye NPR (which may not yet be true, granted), then I'll take ads if it means I get a few more Tiny Desks and so on.
Better a health company with an important message than ... I'm not sure. I run adblock so I don't really remember. Better that than some stupid flash game or clothes or whatever.
- What's dangerous is that NPR will be finished without better funding
Am I overreacting? Maybe. But it's a reasonable fear imo.
- Back that up with numbers
Hey, you're right, honestly I just assumed they were in trouble because a) it's NPR, they're always walking that line and b) why else would they sell out and go ad-heavy.
As a last resort thing, I'm totally fine with tasteful, intelligent advertising. Freely admit I don't know if NPR's at that point though.
Got something I'm working on for you right now. Post it in 15 min.
Now they've gone and really sold out:
I mean, how on earth do they expect me to support them when they give center stage to such opportunism?
-sarcasm.
But then I'd miss Center Stage and in all honesty, I'm interested in what sites I like do to generate revenue. There's really no model that I think works better than user generated. Ads suck. But still if I'm not on the home pages, I'm missing out on innovations, right?
- There's really no model that I think works better than user generated. Ads suck.
I don't know. I'm a member of several private websites that, by virtue of being private or illegal or both, can't really gain ad revenue. They struggle. Constantly. And nearly every time I check them I worry that they'll be gone in a month or two. Erowid, for example, is in trouble again.
Ads are stress-free. User-generated capital is transitory. And is it even ideal? hubski is obviously not under any financial burden, but if one day it was ... I'm on firefox with dark theme right now and there are two huge blank vertical areas on either side of this text box. If mk in some hypothetical future could trick a stupid corporation into paying our server costs and the only drawback was that I had something in my peripheral vision sometimes, I wouldn't mind. I might even think he was just being rational.
Yep, the ads look like the content and are supposed to integrate in to the user experience. Call me old fashioned but I like my ads to look like ads and my content to look like content. It's good to know what's being paid for. There's a fine line between "native ads" and payola.
The Dutch NPO (Netherlands Public Broadcasting) is the organization behind three of the most important television channels we have here (Nederland 1, 2 and 3), accruing a third to half of all the viewers on an average night. Even though it's public television, it gets two-thirds of its money from advertisements. Their site (Dutch) brings up some good points to justify this:
- they are less dependant on governments who at any moment or after elections could decide to cut funding
- it makes sure they have the budget to cover a wide, pluriform programming which has room for smaller minorities (for instance, there are shows aimed at muslims, Frisians, hindus).
- the points above mean that they can compete on the same level as the commercial broadcasters, not competing in profits but in viewers.
- it means that they can produce good high-quality content for relatively little money and that it can stay public. One of the features added in the last years is the ability to rewatch all shows broadcasted by the channels and to stream them live
Besides, they polled their audience and 70% said that they didn't mind ads supporting the public broadcasting. Hey, you gotta take a bathroom break some time.