12/8/2023 0 Comments Hype machine meme![]() It’s hard to pinpoint the impact of a particular service’s growth, but overall there’s only so much time and attention people have for listening to music. Has there been a decline in users due to the rise of other, larger online music services? These ads aren’t always very effective, but the pricing structure still pushes other ad brokers to lower their own rates. Today, a company offering ad space across a group of music sites has to compete with ad exchanges that identify people as “music listeners” based on what websites they visit. We ran lots of ads for movies, music, car and electronics companies, partnered with brands on sponsored events, and more. Before the sweeping changes in the industry, this worked well. Usually, they work with a bunch of music sites at once, creating a convenient package for an advertiser. The deals are simple: The partner finds brands interested in our audience and keeps a commission of the ad buy. We've worked with these and a few other partners (including Vice) to run advertising on Hype Machine. Hype Machine had advertising partnerships with other companies, like Buzz Media (now known as SpinMedia) and Townsquare Media. It’s a big change and it’s why we started our funding campaign. How much was ad revenue at its peak versus today?īecause of the ad spending changes, we are seeing probably one-tenth of the revenue we used to get from advertising. ![]() It seems that full-screen, interstitial images and video would have brought in much more revenue, but at a significant cost to user experience. The mobile ads we tried in our app were various types of image banners shown in lists of tracks. We’ve experimented with mobile ads a bit, but found that they bring in little revenue unless they are overwhelmingly intrusive. This includes many of our own users, who now listen primarily via our mobile apps, which results in a decrease in desktop ad views. Then there’s the shift away from desktop web usage. These ad exchanges sometimes work well for high-traffic sites, but yield little for smaller niche properties. The rest goes to programmatic ad exchanges that show a large volume of ads to targeted users at much lower rates. Instead of ad dollars going to a wide set of individual sites, they now primarily go to Facebook and a handful of large services (Google, Snapchat) and publishers ( Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox). ![]() Many of those changes affected Hype Machine, but there were a few that directly impacted us the most.įirst, there is a big shift in advertising spending. What the fuck happened?Īnthony Volodkin: It's hard to overstate how much the Internet has changed in the past 10 years. Noisey: In 2009, The Guardian declared Hype Machine one of its "100 essential websites." Now, less than a decade later, you’ve had to launch a crowdfunding campaign to keep the site running. In short: The indie ethos of relying on only the support of your fans now applies to websites as much as it applies to bands. In our conversation below (which has been edited for clarity and brevity), he describes the changing economics of online advertising that reward the largest websites while starving out smaller ones, but also how users can buck this trend. I recently discussed Hype Machine’s rollercoaster journey with Volodkin. Thankfully, the site was able to hit both of its crowdfunding goals in mere months of announcing the campaign. Having always been a lean operation, it only needed enough funding to pay three full-time employees (including Volodkin) and to keep the servers up. Without investors or funding, the site had been operating for the last 12 years on advertising revenue alone, but due to the shifting nature of ad buys, it could no longer rely on that MO. Its meteoric rise is all the more reason why news about the website earlier this year was so unexpected: Hype Machine needed the financial support of its users to keep running. ![]()
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