You Get What You Pay For, One Way or Another

It is widely accepted that running a website requires money, and someone will have to pay it, otherwise the website didn’t continue.

That money comes from one of ostensibly four sources: generosity, like Blogger, paid for by Google with shift from behind the sofa cushions, a basis or by some tycoon with truly deep pockets, like The Atlantic, membership, or advertising revenue.

PJ Media, like a lot of great flow places, is paid for by a combination of advertising revenue and membership. We call our membership the Club ( and VIP Gold and Platinum ) program. It’s pretty simple in concept. You pay a small monthly subscription cost, currently$ 49 for the standard VIP account, but we run special savings fairly often. For this you get some privileges: you get access to our comments, which as a side effect keeps trollery down to a dull roar, you get access to our premium content, like my Sky Candy series, &nbsp, with VIP Gold ($ 89/year ) you get VIP access to all the Townhall sites, and with VIP Platinum ($ 159/year ) you get all that plus discounts and gift certificates to the Townhall merch store. &nbsp,

Yeah, that’s a ball for VIP account, keep reading for an explanation why we need it.

Other places work separately. Commonly, places like Forbes and National Review Online offer a some free reports every month, after which you need a subscriber, some sites, like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, give no free information, or virtually nothing.

And then of course there’s the reputation advertising. I believe it is incorrect to identify traditional advertising as completely independent of online content. If you think of it, the biggest difference is that identity press, like CNN or ESPN, is generally just media using an outmoded one-directional online, in cable TV and — yet more antique — broadcast radio. Even then, cable TV is moribund, and usually packaged with internet anyway. Because the technology’s entire structure aims to push the content out, take it or leave it, it’s better to refer to it as “push media.”

But in the most important way, at least for our purposes right now, that legacy push-model media is still ad-supported. Because the population they can target is shrinking, Comcast is trying to sell MSNBC because they are losing money on the ads that promote the network.

This implies that almost all media, whether it be on the internet or through push media, is ad-supported. So, to understand how media is supported, it’s useful to understand advertising.

The purpose of advertising is to get people to change their minds about something: to buy your product, to vote for your candidate, to vote against the other candidate, or to create a favorable or unfavorable opinion about something.

What does this is an impression: someone sees your ad, whether it’s in a web page or on the side of a bus. Every impression costs the advertiser money, and for traditional reasons impressions are measured in millions, the common notation for this is MM, like” 10MM” meaning 10 million impressions. You should be able to tell how old it is by the fact that it uses these mangled Roman numerals. No, not as old as Rome, but when every student in grade school was familiar with Roman numerals and was able to understand what” MM” meant when M times M was used.

So, for example, if the product is Acme Bat-man Suits — hyphenated, no doubt, to protect against a copyright takedown by DC Comics— then every time someone sees an advertisement for Acme Bat-Man Suits, that’s an impression. Of course, through product placement in Roadrunner cartoons, Acme receives millions or billions of impressions.

The most crucial factor for any advertiser is, however, how likely an impression is to produce the desired outcome. If Acme is paying 1¢ per impression, and gets 100MM impressions from Roadrunner LLC, then they owe$ 0.01×100, 000, 000=$ 1 million. If they sell just one Acme Bat-Man suit at$ 49.95 list, that’s not a very good deal. ( Of course, after litigation, Acme has other problems. )

Advertising strategies to address this issue are by attempting to limit the impressions to those who are most likely to make a purchase. This is called targeting. If Acme can limit advertising so that only one Wile E. Coyote, Genius, sees the ad 50 times before making the purchase, that’s 50¢ for the advertising. For a$ 49.95 product, that’s not bad. Even better if Mr. Coyote makes the purchase after the tenth impression.

Traditional push advertising has limitations on how effectively it can target advertising. People over the age of 65 make up the majority of the audience for television news, which is why there are so many ads for continence products. &nbsp,

A company for which I once consulted, Advo, Inc., is a direct mail advertising company — they send those packages of flyers that appear as if by magic (” What? I didn’t ask for this”! ) in your mailbox every single day. Postal regulations require Advo to deliver mail to each post office that serves each postal route they want to place advertisements on, and this requires the postal worker to add the ad to each mailbox in order to get the cheapest rates. &nbsp,

Advo uses the method of targeting by altering the contents of those envelopes in response to what they believe the demographics of the postal route are. Wile E. Would be in the route for animated desert animals — along with the Roadrunner, of course. There’s some impressions wasted.

That was the way advertising stood BI — Before Internet. &nbsp,

The internet changed everything. First of all, by a factor of a factor of 100, 000 or more, the cost of running an advertisement on the internet is radically less expensive than any physical advertising.

More importantly, it changed targeting. When an ad — or really anything, but we’re concerned with ads here — is delivered to your browser, the whole protocol involved is delivering the ad to you personally. Simplifying outrageously, you have an address on the internet that applied not just to you personally, but actually to every device you own individually.

This is like advertising nirvana— not the band, the cessation of desires. Now, theoretically, it can target advertising down to the individual.

Here, Google enters the picture. Google’s business model for search and advertising is basically Tech Bro Santa Claus: it sees you when you’re sleeping, it sees when you’re awake, it knows when you’ve been bad or good and that means it knows exactly what you’ve been searching, reading, or listening to. So when Mr. Coyote searches Google for flying suits, Google knows.

Google turns into an ad vendor when you advertise something on your website and get a link to the advertisement. &nbsp,

When Wile — I’ve known him for decades — goes to look at, say, Becky’s Wacky Wabbit Wecipes, Google sees it’s Wile E. Coyote’s internet address, and supplies an ad for Acme Bat-Man Suits, and the rest is an amusing animated short, and a cause for legal action.

Because Google dominates search, it has all the targeting information. Because it has all the targeting information, it can provide the best, most tasty, customized ads, and each ad served literally costs almost nothing. Google basically mints money in exchange for a better product at a lower price.

As a good libertarian anarcho-capitalist, this should make me happy, right? And, in fact, it used to. I’d like to know why Google was showing me ads that perfectly matched my interests.

The only problem: Google decided it didn’t like my interests. This is where things start to feel uncomfortable for PJ Media and the conservative internet media in general. Write articles on things Google doesn’t like, like the Second Amendment, or Hunter Biden’s laptop, or criticizing certain politicians, and you get a notice from Google that you’ve been de-monitized. Or maybe demon-itized. Whatever. This implies that you as the publisher don’t receive payment for some articles that may receive ads that are served. Which Google loves, by the way — you can bet they still count the impressions, but now they get those impressions for free.

If you don’t pay our Alphabet masters enough, they might refuse to do any advertising for you. They are in control of a sizable portion of the online advertising industry. Really big. ( Grok thinks it’s about 30 percent, DoJ thinks it’s 91 percent. Either way, it’s the dominant player. )

Getting our articles de-monitized hits us where we live, as I’m sure you understand. It’s a running problem for all the Townhall properties. However, you are reduced to the more expensive ad providers if you defame the Google Gods enough to lose all of your advertising with them. They don’t get paid as much because they can’t charge as much because they don’t have Tech Bro Santa to target. So you discover that your pages are full of advertisements like remedies for toe fungus.

DoJ has taken a different view of Google’s practical monopoly, which required them to change their policies in a number of ways that affected the effectiveness of their targeting. Have you noticed, however, that many websites now require you to register for a “free” account? When you do so, you’re agreeing to be tracked, restoring the advertising leverage.

As I mentioned before, this has a pretty severe impact on PJ Media and the Townhall properties. That’s the motivation for the VIP programs. If you sign up for VIP, VIP Gold, or VIP Platinum, what you’re doing is saying” In your face Sundar Pinchar, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page! I make the content choices I make.”

And we appreciate it. &nbsp,

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