If a person knows anything at all about internet business, they certainly know that those numerous web sites they visit every day are mostly supported by advertising – those flashy banners that are everywhere these days. But since no one ever clicks those “You are one millionth visitor, click here for your prize” banners, everyone in the online business knows there’s one important thing about ads that actually makes them work: targeting.
It is simple: if you want to sell shoes in your San Francisco store, you will not want your ads to be visible to people somewhere in Texas because chances of them actually making a purchase from your store are very low (virtually non-existent given that they could only buy your shoes if they visit California for some reason and actually remember the ad and be motivated enough to go and buy the shoes). So most advertisers these days (especially those that sell some real-life goods or services) prefer to decide exactly what groups of users will be exposed to their ads.
Targeting for ads may vary depending on the location, age, gender, and other factors that are important for advertisers for any number of reasons. And since advertisers only want to pay to reach specific categories of users, it is just logical that advertising networks and independent online publishers follow and offer all types of targeting to their customers – and only serving ads to those people who fall into the target audience for the advertiser.
But sometimes targeting may be tricky and I have a feeling that there are quite a number of situations where advertisers pay for impressions that they would never pay for if they realized such impressions existed at all. My latest example is quite impressive because to me it sounds like a very large-scale waste of someone’s money.
You know, I am a huge fan of all the advantages of online music services where you are offered tons of radio stations of all the genres you can imagine and are allowed to listen to the music for free – on condition that you will listen to some ads on the road. In fact, I would gladly pay for such a service to be ad-free but for now I have not found the perfect combination of stations I’d really want to listen to AND the feature of actually being able to pay for any kind of premium account at all.
My several-months-old journey into the Apple App Store world accompanied by my iPod Touch has taught me quite a few things about the world of music that is monetized by ads that I thought could never exist. Like, I know perfectly well that the vast majority of well-known music services like Pandora will never allow international users to listen to their music for a mix of licensing and monetization reasons. Obviously, applications for such services are not available to download/buy from international App Store versions for the countries where users are not allowed to access such content.
But there are curious examples that are probably simply not telling the whole truth to their advertisers – and prefer to enjoy international audience accompanied by higher payments from advertisers who believe they pay for US users. The first such example is AccuRadio – a nice music service with an incredibly rich selection of stations, especially in my favorite category of smooth jazz, the genre that I happen to enjoy the most as a background when I work so the one that I listen to the most.
For some reasons I have no idea of, they do not restrict access of international users to their music and also serve English-language ads for services like TurboTax that international users will hardly ever have a chance of using. The only disadvantage of this service is that you can only listen to their music in a new browser window instead of using some media player that you already have. The reason is simple: in addition to audio ads, they also serve ads in this browser-based player but I hate having extra windows or tabs where I don’t need them, let alone in my browser – so I started looking for alternatives. And I easily found one in the US App Store (that I also happen to have an account for) – it was a dedicated AccuRadio application that I could use on my iPod to listen to my music over the home Wi-Fi network. Unfortunately after a while with any online radio you begin to notice too many repetitions of tracks – so it is no wonder that eventually I headed for some more services I could use for diversity.
And believe me, there was no lack of alternatives. Yahoo! Music does not allow you to listen to their music from your computer when they check your IP but if you use the iPhone application to do exactly that – the IP is probably not verified because I can listen to music all I want from Russia without doing any extra tricks. There are more such examples (I actually know of them) but I’d rather keep silence here for them not to implement IP checks in their protocols as they may turn into my favorite music services one day if the guys above fix the issues and I stay without two favorites – after all, I don’t want to be left without online music services altogether.
But the most important thing here is how it must look from an advertiser point of view should they ever discover such practices. They pay some amount of money for every user listening to their ad on this or that radio station – and they want the user to be able to interact with them, ideally buy their product or service. And what’s the point of paying for an ad for a product that a specific user will never have any desire to interact with because of one simple limitation: this product or service is simply not available in the country they live in? Honestly, this looks very much like cheating – intentional or not but still.
True, I am cheating a little here myself because these applications are not available to download in various country-specific App Stores dedicated for the countries where such applications should not work – and I use a US-based account for purchases in the App Store so I am easily allowed access in. But this is hardly very illegal given that I also use this account for purchases of equipment for my US-based company which happens to be a US taxpayer so I should probably be allowed to use iTunes as well.
There are similar examples in the fields other than online music but they are harder to find because – I suppose – they are much easier to check and verify for the advertisers. For example, a while back sitting here in Russia with a Russian IP address when surfing the web I frequently saw ads for Motorola Droid on various tech-focused websites and blogs – and this is pretty much surprising given that Droid is not available for purchase in Russia at all and I have no idea if it ever will be.
Now as a web publisher myself I can certainly understand those ad networks and publishers that are involved in such practices because they simply want more money for the audience they have – and if an advertiser does not have full access to the audience information, chances are they will easily pay based on the figures they are shown, no matter how far from truth they may be. Yet being a pathologically honest person myself, I have a feeling that this approach may be more or less risky because advertisers will find out sooner or later about what exactly they pay for – or some new technologies allow them to verify what they pay for and this may also end in a disaster.
So why not try to sell the audience you already have to your existing advertisers (maybe at a lower rate but they will at least have a chance of targeting your audience with actually targeted ads for those people who are not based in the US) or find new advertisers for your international audience who will consider such audience valuable enough to pay for. And cheating on an industry level can hardly be described as best practice, after all.
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