Demographic Surveys And Advertising...
from the does-it-really-matter? dept
As some people know, we're a part of
Federated Media's network of sites. Working with FM has been great. Advertising has not been a main part of our business model, but with so many requests coming in every day, we figured it was worth experimenting with an advertising program. FM keeps asking us to put a
survey on the site, to get people to volunteer their demographic information. Honestly, I don't know how useful that info really is for targeting ads -- and I'm not sure I believe that advertisers really need that info to understand who's reading the site. However, it's how the ad game works. If such things bug you (and they do bug plenty of people), please feel free to ignore the survey and this post. I'll be interested to see if the data actually does help better target ads. In related news, FM has now
launched their self-serve platform for anyone looking to place advertisements on any of the sites in their network. While Google gets all sorts of credit for contextual advertising, one of their real innovations was
making it easy for advertisers to places ads. Other online ad systems involved way too much effort for many (especially small) advertisers. FM's John Battelle, who has literally written the book on Google, obviously understands this and is putting into practice with this platform.
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Literally
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Demographics actually do help quite a bit
Forgive me for going on about this, but I design surveys for a living and think relating demographics to marketing is a vastly underappreciated aspect of marketing.
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Re: Demographics actually do help quite a bit
Your comment makes sense... if everything works perfectly.
There are a few reasons I don't buy it.
First, as others have pointed out, the info given in surveys isn't necessarily accurate. Some may lie. Second, it's a self-selecting bias where only the people who choose to answer the surveys give data.
However, the bigger issue is that if anyone reads this site regularly, you should know who it attracts without needing survey info. Your extreme example (85% male) is silly... because anyone reading a site with that high a male readership would KNOW that without having to look at the demographic data.
Finally, for the type of ads that would run on a site like this, I really doubt that you can get that fine a level of targeting that would really increase clickthroughs. It's not hard to figure out what a well targeted ad would be from the CONTENT on the site, rather than the demographic info of the readership. No one's going to advertise make-up here, because of the content. They might advertise computers. Demographic info isn't going to change that.
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Too targeted now
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Not perfect but still better than nothing
As an advertiser, I am already using Google's demographic targeting, and like email marketing because of its high targeting capabilities. I don't know how RSS advertising will ever work with demographic targeting.
That being said, Techdirt is reaching a very specific target group, mostly B2B. Advertisers will probably want to advertise on Techcrunch to reach an upscale population of Internet opinion leaders, whatever their age and gender. If I want to sell tennis shoes to 18-24 years old male, I won't advertise on Techcrunch even if it's the audience. If I were you, I would instead focus your questions on your reader's profession and industry, with a focus on IT of course. B2B advertisers will spend much more money than B2C for a same lead...
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Why not target their interest
I really question the value of throwing random, demographically-based ads at your audience. I think people go different places for different things. It's also entirely possible that I see things differently than most people.
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Racial profiling surveys
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