I saw this monstrosity this evening and it made me quite concerned about the state of advertising in Nigeria. Three questions came to mind:
Why has the publisher maligned the aesthetics of her site and the sensibilities of her users in the name of ad dollars?
Why have these (mostly “big name”) advertisers and their supposedly sophisticated agencies decided to ignore the lessons learned in almost two decades of digital performance and brand advertising?
Why are the readers subjecting themselves to this sort of ad onslaught?
It seems the only beneficiary is the publisher, and whilst from an economic perspective, it is easy to say it is not sustainable, something tells me that the level of crudeness on display is an indicator of how far we’ve fallen as a society (intellectually and taste-wise), and the depth we’ve fallen might quite possibly preclude any improvement in the short term.
You write like you’re really pained, anyway that’s BTW.
I don’t think its the publisher’s fault (yes it’s not).
*View the blog again, this time scroll down you’ll see too many ads That’ll tell you the demand for ad slots on that blog are on the high.
*Many advertisers(actually Nigerian ) don’ t give half a rat arse about the ROI or conversion of their ads on popular sites I doubt they really care about clicks either since some ads there may never be seen.
I sometime ago read about an advertiser wanting his ad just to appear on LIB and that’s all.
*Advertisers would always want their ad squeezed into one corner that only few scientist can reveal all in the name of advertising on popular blogs.
*You talked about readers/visitors. Well, a couple of people I’ve met who visit LIB regularly don’t know what an ad is or how to spot one. Really they don’t.
*You forgot to note that majority users/visitors are on mobile so they don’t see all that, you’re seeing them cos you’re on desktop.
*Finally for the publisher, who cares? Long as the money keeps coming ‘legally’. If I were the publisher and the demand is high I’ll do same but maybe in an ingenious way to earn more .
Also none of these are blocking ‘the gossip’(content) so visitors need not worry, only thing, it consumes data and takes time to load.
And thats actually a good thing, except that your snark makes it come off as the opposite. Everything you followed up with is true, and that is the problem. Now, how do we solve it?
The reason why advertisers still prefer stuff like this is that most of them are just getting exposed to what digital advertising really is. Someone with vast experience in traditional marketing will see Linda’s blog as an advantage that he needs to take for his business. Traditional marketing does not care about engagement in form of clicks et al, it’s all about reach. What is the average reach of your TV programme? How many people see your billboard in that location? Blah blah blah.
Once, Linda can show them her numbers and they are quite huge, these guys are fine with it. They don’t care about measurement or analytics. They just want to be seen by as many people as possible. They are obviously doing digital with a traditional mindset.
From my experience dealing with Linda’s blog, no numbers are given. Just rates. I don’t know if that has changed.
I don’t think traditional marketing (advertising really) is the problem. Traditional brand marketers have ways of measuring the effectiveness of their ads. Reach is important to them but they are also about return on investment from such reach.
I think “lazy” marketing is really the problem. When you are not really concerned about the effectiveness of your marketing and proving return on investment on marketing spend.
I mean, how can someone wake up and say “I must advertise on this particular site” without first asking the right question to see if the site is a good fit for you in the first place?
The “lazy” marketing done offline is now being done online. That’s just it. Traditional brand marketing is not to blame.
While education is key, being held accountable for marketing spend is even more so. As far as marketers are not held accountable for their marketing spend, lazy marketing might continue irrespective of education.
Easy tiger. Nobody is pained by your role model. On the contrary, I actually want to show how this antiquated ad strategy actually leaves significant money on the table, as opposed to optimising it, which from your response, I think you believe.
First off, some background. I’ve been working in and out of the digital ad tech industry since 2007. I co-founded a company in San Jose that is running up until today and still provides the core ad tech to some very large ad networks and publishers in the US. I’ve been privileged to have a “deep in the trenches” look at ad tech in its most sophisticated market, and get a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
Okay, now that’s done, let’s examine a few basic things that are wrong with that publisher’s ad strategy.
Lack of data and targeting: Data is by far most important asset in advertising. It allows you to build a profile of your visitors, segment them into buckets, and show relevant, hopefully performant ads to the user. It doesn’t matter if the advertiser doesn’t care about ROI (which isn’t true by the way, talk to the shareholders and ask them if they don’t care). Ads need to be relevant or they are a total waste of time, space, and money. Showing me as that site did, an ad about hair extensions is a waste. However, showing me a Paystack ad (or PayWithCapture), would be much more valuable.
Lack of bid optimisation: As far as I know, there’s very little ad tech running on that site, and no way for anyone to bid higher for Lagos or Kano traffic, or pay a premium for traffic on the weekends, or traffic that also visited Nairabet’s site in the last 30 days.
Lack of mobile optimisation: As you alluded in your response, the publisher isn’t monetising mobile effectively. Why is that? Clearly, the large leaderboard ads don’t work on small mobile screens, and there’s a limit to the real estate available. What that means is that she needs to utilise the available ad space a lot more effectively i.e. by combining (1) and (2) above.
There’s a lot more that can be done to grow that revenue by 300% but I’ll stop here.
Yes the blog is profitable but she is leaving money on the table. Without data, targeting, and bid optimisation, she is unable to scale the business to serve thousands of advertisers (each buying a relevant niche at a premium), and is left with just a few dozen (big spenders). Inevitably, the media buyers will get wiser, or users will start using ad blockers, so it is important that leading publishers should innovate to make it work for their advertisers and users because when they do, the ad spend faucet really starts to gush. Ask Google.
Reach is good. Very good in fact but it needs to be qualified. Say she sells each ad at $1 eCPM and gets say 10,000,000 page views per month. Across 5 ads, it brings home roughly $50000 per month. Now what if 10% of the audience are males in Nigeria, and 30% are US-based females.
By being able to segment your traffic dynamically, you can sell 1mln page views at a $2 premium to advertisers such as Orijin, Bet365, et al, and 3mln page views to Sears, Candy Crush etc at a $4 premium (because US and CA traffic are the most sought after). The remaining 60mln page views are sold to regular advertisers at $1 eCPM.
Results:
Old revenue: $50,000 per month
New revenue: $100,000 per month
Very simple. Same traffic. Or simply put, it’s the difference between two houses in Banana Island and one
Now that’s really surprising. I wasn’t aware people would buy ads without knowing the reach. How do the agencies account for the spend?
With the oncoming fiscal austerity and general economic slowdown, I think it might start to change.
In addition, I think those advertisers that are used to buying ads through data driven platforms such as Google AdSense but cannot afford to do some any longer due to the weak Naira will start to demand for more data and targeting tools in order to buy directly from the publisher.
Ever wondered why Nairaland and Linda Ikeji’s blog haven’t changed over the years to implement better layouts and new features and yet awesome new websites and forums are nowhere close to them even with their great UI? It’s simple – the market doesn’t care. For what it’s worth, your amazing features might just be you “stressing” them. So if they just want X, give them X.
Not another “leave Nairaland and Linda Ikeji alone” post please. I believe we have enough of those on this forum already, and frankly, adds no substance to this conversation.
If I may add to OP’s observation, I was discussing with someone over the weekend about how you find new blogs launching with a plethora of ad spaces already set aside on their layout. No data whatsoever as to what demographic is interested in reading the articles posted or whatever, but an assumption has already been made that the ads would come and that would be the only way to survive. And just like that, creative thinking is numbed. No attempt to see how you can even be smart and use content marketing to your advantage.
An unintended side effect of that excerpt which you have generally taken as gospel would be to consider that for every “awesome new website or forum”, there are tons of mediocre ones and none of these have also done anything to dent the Nairaland/LIB market. Basically, give up - because nothing can be done. Right?
Let’s not lower our standards please, but rather continue to explore ways we can fix this.
The way a typical Nigerian analyzes success is quiet peculiar.
I am a fan of Linda’s success; am always a jolly observer of homegrown successes like hers. But waving off the faintest intelligible examination surrounding her blog is another thing entirely…
LIB is not driven on platform features but consistent gossip-content pandering to snippet size easy ‘digestibles’ - no more than 100words apiece.
If any blogger wants to compete that’s where to look at - content appeal - not blog features. So while you blindly bring up platform features as a point of reference you fail to mention other platforms which have differentiated themselves by way of Content and how they’ve thrived.
The crowd that won’t be caught dead on LIB, may have TNC - the naked convos - on active bookmark. The latter is by all count a successful community.
Also worthy of note is the money most of these guys are leaving on the table, as OP said.
I was trying to sample an ad copy for a business recently; starter pack for ads on NL is 20K and on LIB? - didn’t even bother.
So i took my 100 buck to FB and split tested with AdWords. Hey, I know Seun or Linda won’t be any means poorer for that lose but who knows how many more of ‘us’ have been turned off by that heedless bar. That’s by the way…
The excerpt is obviously not my personal view on this ( which informed the intro smiley )… it’s just a coincidence that this came up just after I finished reading the article… and seeing
I felt the excerpt wasn’t too far from it.
That said… I don’t feel lowering standards is the way to go, but I bet the system has frustrated many into doing so.
What if we had a browser extension that works just like wikiwand for Nairaland [ludicrous?]
Apart from the garish shock of five ads being thrust in your face before any content, I wasn’t particularly bothered about the layout of the site. If the readers like it and it loads well, then everybody is happy.
What’s more important is what shows in the ad spaces. The ads are untargeted so the space is a commodity and will be priced as such. It also appears like the publisher has reached an pricing ceiling hence the need to create more ad spaces. In addition, the publisher is not structured to serve smaller advertisers who are more concerned about performance and won’t buy at the same price as the whales. Everything will be great as long as the whales keep buying. Yahoo! had that strategy. Look at where they are now.
Well targeted ads always attract a premium, so why not provide that feature to advertisers, as opposed to selling untargeted ad spaces at commodity prices. You serve more advertisers (i.e. customers) and make more money. Any publisher without ad tech is just leaving easy money on the table. Heck, even Nairaland has basic ad targeting, self-service advertising, and demand driven pricing.
Even Radar has a long way to go. @lordbanks - your beautiful forum can do better than this:
Are you sure that was Radar? I’ve heard of ad blockers, but not ad inserters. Like we said in the last community update, ads are coming to Radar, but they haven’t come yet. And when they do, they certainly won’t look like that.
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