Online Media Is at a Fork in the Road, So We're Removing Ads for Members

4 months ago 19

Here’s some fun math. At our current rates, if you become a member of this website at our lowest annual price (a little less than $4 a month), in order for us to make the same amount of money by just seeing ads, you’d have to view a minimum of 6,500 articles a year. These calculations are, in reality, based on an ideal situation that doesn’t exist. Advertisers don’t want to show the same ad to the same person 100 times, so the more you view the website, the less money we make per ad, and it becomes something akin to Achilles and the Tortoise, which means it might actually be impossible to read enough stories to break-even relative to a member.

If you want to know why so many of the websites you love are closing or getting worse, this is the big reason. It’s not just social media, reading habits, search engines, and Private Equity that are to blame; it’s that the assumptions websites are built around (more traffic, more ads, forever) are simply wrong. It’s why so much of what you read on the Internet is either AI slop or written by content creators who work in what amount to digital sweatshops.

The big story in advertising technology this week? A bunch of companies were basically tricked into paying money to put ads on an adult website app, which means if we want to compete for programmatic advertising (the kind of automated ads you mostly see here) dollars, we have to try to beat that. Here’s a great quote from an Adweek article about this:

“This whole ecosystem is sort of like the subprime mortgage thing, where there’s really bad inventory repackaged with high quality inventory, and they say, ‘It’s good inventory!’”

This is all to say that while we’re grateful to have anyone read our work, the structure of online advertising generally makes it so that if we were a solely ad-based site, we wouldn’t be financially motivated to make stuff you’ll love to read. Someone tricked into reading a post is worth as much as someone who is genuinely interested in a story. There’s no money in brand-building. In the short term, all the money is in brand destruction: killing what’s good, firing writers, and trying to squeeze every last cent out of every eyeball.

From the perspective of the people who buy media brands, it makes a sort of sense. The chart always has to go up and to the right, so with the tools most people who run websites are given the obvious move is to reduce cost by replacing real journalists with overseas freelancers and increase revenue by stuffing some more dirtbox Taboola crap at the bottom of an infinitely scrolling stream.

Readers hate this. They hate this. Everyone knows readers hate this. Everyone feels bad about it. Almost no one changes anything.

So we’re changing it as much as we can. And not just because we also hate it (we do), but because we think that the greatest way to create a valuable and resilient media brand that’ll survive into the future is to make a product that people love to read. It’s not a sophisticated thought, but it’s a complicated one to execute.

If you’re a logged-in and paying member of this website, you’ve probably noticed that almost all the ads have disappeared. Those autoplay videos? They’re not autoplaying anymore. The little video mobile that pops up on your phone? It’s not there. The banner ads, they’re gone. This is both a “thank you” to current members for support, and an investment in the future.

A person who pays a small amount each month to this website in order to read it (and get a cool shirt, if that’s what they want) brings lifetime value that is literally thousands of times greater than someone who follows a Facebook link here and reads something once.

I did the math, because that’s my job, and the amount I suspect we’ll lose from this change is the equivalent of adding about 100 members. Many of you have told me that the one thing keeping you from becoming a member is that you have to see ads, so I’m asking you to please follow up on that statement by becoming a member if you’re able.

To clarify, this doesn’t mean that as a member you won’t see anything that resembles advertising. By not buying traffic or tricking people to read our site, we’ve assembled a large audience (bigger than a lot of legacy media brands) of people who buy a lot of cars. This place is full of people who love to wrench, or dream of wrenching. This is an incredibly valuable audience and the partnerships we do, like the one currently involving our Murano CrossCabriolet, are so fun to read that we wouldn’t want to restrict members from seeing that.

But display ads? So long as we can afford to, those are going away for logged-in paying members.

Will we adjust what kind of ads we show non-members? Probably, yeah. Our initial goal was to have 50% fewer ads than our main competitors, so maybe that number will go to 33%, or we’ll allow more ad-types. We might do some more reminders about membership to folks who aren’t members. All the same, we want people who come here to have a great experience, whether it’s their first visit or their 9,000th, so we are still aiming to make this place feel better than other sites, even for those who can’t pay for the content.

Ultimately, the more we’re interested in what members say, and the less we have to duke it out with adult-oriented apps for ad dollars, the better this website will be. While almost every other one of our competitors has to make their website worse to survive, we’ll be focused on making our website better, and I suspect that’ll result in us being the best and most valuable car site in the world (I kinda already think we’re the best).

If this sounds good to you, please consider becoming a member (also help us force Adrian into a SsangYong). And to those who made the decision to join up before this, thank you again for your support.