(I’'m Will, the General Manager of Kos Media, and one of the folks involved in creating the tag-based unit on Daily Kos. You can read my bio here)
So on Monday, Markos and I became aware of the controversy surrounding the new tag-based advertising unit here on Daily Kos while on vacation separately. Unfortunately, we also both continued to travel through this week on business so we weren’t able to address the community directly regarding this. We could have dropped in a drive by diary perhaps, but that’s not appropriate for this. So I’m here to address it now. I will be in the comments and hopefully Tim from SEIU and perhaps Henry from Blogads will be as well.
I do want to thank Tim Tagaris, SEIU's New Media Director (and Ned Lamont's old Internet Director) for stepping up and addressing the community directly over a holiday weekend in which the relevant Daily Kos admin (me) was away unable to do so.
First, some background: As you know, Daily Kos and all other Kos Media network sites are advertising supported. Matter of fact, most years it represents over 95% of our revenue. The advertising on Daily Kos funds the operations of our sibling sites like MotherTalkers, Congress Matters, Street Prophets, and Daily Kos TV. Kos Media is also the largest supporter of the Kos Fellowship Program. And just so we’re all on the same page because some folks aren’t aware of this: We receive no funding from investors or other outside sources. So we can only spend and invest what we earn, with a little credit help from banks when it’s necessary.
You may also be aware that that online advertising spending has been hit hard by the economic downturn. Competition for those dollars that are available is fierce. So prices are dropping. Advertising networks such as Google also provide a low-cost, highly targeted service that’s desirable to ROI-centric advertisers. Daily Kos is not immune to these pressures and the larger macro-economic situation.
So to compete we have to keep our brand strong, our prices where we’re comfortable, and we’ll have to innovate to draw those advertisers and to keep the ones that have advertised with us for a long time, such as SEIU.
Because of this, the action tag unit (which is what we call it internally) was hatched. We wanted to provide an advertiser a way to engage with the Daily Kos audience in a targeted way instead of broadcasting the ad across the site and on story pages that may not be relevant to the topic of the post or diary. If someone is reading a post about healthcare chances are they want to know a bit more about the topic or what some organization is doing to help reform our system. We hope the tag-based unit can provide that contextual ad unit that some advertisers desire and go elsewhere to find.
The feedback provided over the weekend alerted us to 4 issues:
- Rollout: Our plan was to have a diary about the rollout after we got all of the issues resolved. From now on, we’ll do a better job of communicating about potentially controversial new features.
- Subscribers with ads turned off: Obvious screw up. Fixed immediately when known.
- Unclear creative: The image ad wasn’t exactly clear that it was an ad. Feedback duly noted. We’ll now clearly mark the unit as ADVERTISEMENT”.
- Placement: From the beginning the action tag unit presented some technological challenges. One of the main ones is placement. The code was often breaking the page layout so we didn’t implement the ad exactly as desired due to some issues with IE browsers. Also, we’ve been placing ads in a similar location for a very long time. Contrary to some claims, ads are placed in a lot of places besides the standard blogads strip. We'’ll continue to experiment on placement.
Again, sorry for the delayed response, but we've listened and we’ll implement the changes immediately so you should see differences this morning. I also want to again thank Tim Tagaris and SEIU for being so willing to work with us on this. Tim was working with Blogads and talking with the community before I even knew about the controversy.
Will