What I had trouble understanding however, was the company's business model. That's kinda important and was a glaring hole in my understanding of the position.
From what I could gather, the company made money by click revenue. They would create ads for companies, match the ads with website clients where the ads would get maximum clicks, then collect the money from the company dependent on how many clicks occurred or how many purchases the clicks led to.
I wish I had a flow chart to explain that.
My biggest question while I worked there was: Who clicks the ads? I don't think I've ever known a single person who clicks web ads on purpose. Too often, they are clicked by accident. They are more annoying than practical.
A few months ago, there was an article on Bloomberg.com that gave some insight into how the internet ad world works. The article detailed the dark, deceitful world of fake hits - hits created by bots and programs, not real people. Ad companies "buy" hits from unscrupulous middle men, and the company with the product has to pay. After all, they are the ones trying to sell the product.
According to Bloomberg,
The traffic market is unregulated, and sellers range from unimpeachable to adequate to downright sleazy; price is part of the market’s code.
The article cites Kellogg's as a company trying to cut out the ad-placing middle men. However, that might mean less views.
Ad fraud may eventually turn into a manageable nuisance like shoplifting, something that companies learn to control without ever eradicating. Advertisers generally see lower levels of fraudulent traffic by dealing directly with publishers rather than using programmatic exchanges. Of course, that also means missing out on the scale that automation provides.
The company I worked for called themselves honest and said they played by the rules. I wasn't there long enough to dispute that claim. But I never could put my finger on how their revenue was created. It never made sense to me.
On a related note, there is a growing number of people surfing the web with ad-blockers. Bloomberg also recently published an article on the growth of ad blockers. More and more people are trying to cut ads out of their web experience. I am of that group. My web experience is cleaner and faster without the clutter of internet ads.
Yes, there are some websites who forbid viewing with an ad block. They tell visitors to deactivate their ad blocker. To me, their content is not that valuable for me to change my browsing behavior.
(Interesting aside: in Afghanistan, I saw very little advertising. The economy isn't that developed and on the base the military controls almost all the messaging. When I returned to America, I realized how often we see ads. Most Americans don't even realize ads are everywhere.)
I know there are people who rely on ads to put food on their dinner table. They write and create and hope website owners will pay them a portion of the ad revenue generated from the page viewers the content brought to the page. To me, that's naive. Too many of these companies are using third-party ad companies who are buying traffic. It's not the writer bringing in traffic, it's the bots. And that's why websites such as Huffington Post don't pay writers. Because in most cases, the text could be lorem ipsum. As long as the bots click the page and the ads, money circulates.
It's all a shady shellgame.
