If that's true, it's not because ad tech doesn't work, it's that most advertisers don't use it properly. A large percentage of my company's revenue comes from performance marketing (running paid traffic to affiliate offers) and it works very well for us. You just have to know what you're doing, make sure you're not getting too much bot/junk traffic, and bid the appropriate amounts. We've written software that handles all of this automatically, and our paid traffic campaigns do amazingly well. Show me another investment in which you can reliably and consistently achieve 30%+ ROI weekly with a fair amount of scalability.
Ironically, native ad networks like Taboola and Revcontent will flourish in the new GDPR world. Since they target ads based mostly on nothing more than the topic of the content that the user is viewing, these ads are effective enough for smart performance marketers to make money with, and GDPR doesn't fundamentally change anything about their model. EU advertisers will flock to native and abandon other forms of advertising that were based on more invasive targeting.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. But generally we get about a 30-50% ROI on our native ad campaigns once they are optimized, and most affiliate networks pay weekly if you produce significant revenue. We do better than most because I wrote some clever stuff to identify sites that were sending us mostly bots/bad traffic and automatically blacklist them from showing our ads. There are a ton of these in the native ad space.
I just suspect most of the trick is in generating demand, not finding it.
There are evergreen affiliate niches such as weight loss, hair loss, erectile dysfunction, etc. Aging, bad genetics, and poor lifestyle choices generate the demand for us. Making money in these niches is generally as simple as placing ads on sites where people that belong to certain known demographic groups visit, and reducing fraudulent traffic by as much as possible.
How do you measure the 30%? Compared to previous revenue or compared to a cohort you purposely don't advertise to, but is randomly selected from those you do?
That said, the niches you describe sounds like snake oil markets. :(
If that's true, it's not because ad tech doesn't work, it's that most advertisers don't use it properly. A large percentage of my company's revenue comes from performance marketing (running paid traffic to affiliate offers) and it works very well for us. You just have to know what you're doing, make sure you're not getting too much bot/junk traffic, and bid the appropriate amounts. We've written software that handles all of this automatically, and our paid traffic campaigns do amazingly well. Show me another investment in which you can reliably and consistently achieve 30%+ ROI weekly with a fair amount of scalability.
Ironically, native ad networks like Taboola and Revcontent will flourish in the new GDPR world. Since they target ads based mostly on nothing more than the topic of the content that the user is viewing, these ads are effective enough for smart performance marketers to make money with, and GDPR doesn't fundamentally change anything about their model. EU advertisers will flock to native and abandon other forms of advertising that were based on more invasive targeting.