At InterNext I’m noticing that a huge number of the “sponsor booths” are “ad networks”. It makes me wonder what happened to the old school sponsors who had sites that you’d promote. I know ad networks have always been a thing and they have their place, but it feels like they’ve completely taken over. That said, InterNext is mostly straight porn with a little bit of gambling and cannabis mixed in.
I’m just wondering if I’m missing something. Who are these people who want an ad network rather than a traditional sponsor/affiliate relationship?
If I had to guess I’d say so many small to mid-sized affiliates went out of business that if you have a paysite you still need traffic, so they’ll buy it from an ad network. Meanwhile the “affiliates” (traffic sources) that are doing really well are the huge tubes, etc that are operating on a scale where micro-optimizations make sense, and ad networks offer that – often they start their own ad network, which is why so many exist.
I do see a huge increase in emails from ad networks people, who are looking to buy traffic. Their offers are never tempting though… to me at least. Their offers might be interesting to tube sites with lots of mediocre traffic, but compared to my $/click it’s definitely not worth it.
I think you’re right… there’s more traffic now while there are fewer players (affiliates). I can imagine a lot of them prefer selling traffic as opposed to tweaking things and deal with lots of sponsors.
Same for me, I keep getting their emails and if I don’t reply they will email again asking did you get my last email? They seem desperate to get more traffic but personally I can’t see the point of using a network. So no, I dont think you are missing anything by not using them, all they do is take a cut from your already small cut.
Even I get questions for whether we have traffic… and it takes a bit to explain that we’re a web host and have none. I stopped being nice to them and started hard-selling them hosting instead. Then I follow up asking if they got my email that’s the price of not doing the research before your cold calls.
Middlemen are not being eliminated, they are being elevated! And multiplying, and each one taking little cuts from ever-narrowing profit margins.
I remember going to a conference in Amsterdam that seemed to be dialers trying to sell to other dialers. Then it was billing companies, now traffic companies.
All the ad networks have scraped ever possible email address from our site, so those emails get delivered 10x to us, even to our abuse@ email addresses.
I get pissed about that “we have a direct buyer for your traffic” emails because it’s just a straight up lie. Otherwise, I’m slowly adding them to the spam folder.
that’s the price of not doing the research before your cold calls. 