FAQ

Despite it’s size and ubiquity, the current online ad ecosystem is riddled with issues that have eroded trust and efficiency for all parties.  Users are exposed to increasing numbers of intrusive ads wherever they go; brands face challenges with ad fraud, bots, and fake traffic; and content creators have perverse incentives to constantly chase traffic and clicks just to stay afloat.

We thought there has to be a better way to use advertising to monetize content other than what’s out there now.

Years of ad testing has taught us that when an ad is interesting, funny, clever, relevant, emotive, people enjoy them. Most of the time, ads are intrusive and badly targeted. Creating a space where ‘ads are the content’, giving people autonomy over their ad choices, and connecting ad viewing to their content consumption, perfectly aligns incentives to have people watch ads on their own.

The great ad-person Howard Gossage once said ‘People don’t watch ads, they watch what interests them, and sometimes that happens to be an ad”. With Viewsub, we’re taking this deep insight to its fullest by creating a system that connects users to ads they want to see.

Seth Godin coined the phrase Permission Marketing and defined it as only connecting with customer who have shown an interest in you.

Permission-based Advertising is the same idea applied to monetizing online content. We’ve actually taken many of the tenets of Permission Marketing – opt-in relationships, control, respect for readers time, etc. and used them to create an ad experience that eliminates many of the issues with online advertising.

Not that we know of.  There have been many attempts to introduce different types of advertising experiences in, around, and before content, but these have typically still blocked users from viewing content until they perform some sort of task.  Viewsub is about trading content engagement for ad engagement where the user is in full control of their ad experience.

If they are fully engaged with a publisher/content creator, we think most people will only be watching 2-3 mins of sponsored content/ads a week to keep access to their content experience.  And it could be less.

The reason for the light ad-load is that Viewsub doesn’t deal with ad-impressions, we only deal in ad-views.  Ad-views are intentional views from a user to watch the entire length of an ad (that’s the only way they can pay down their engagement credit balance).

That intentional ad-view is so important because it’s such a high-quality engagement compared to an impression. The more ‘high quality ad engagements’ we can create per user, the less ads each user needs to watch.

We think Viewsub will be in addition to other monetization models.  While open-web ads monetize traffic and subscriptions monetize the ‘core audience’, Viewsub targets those in-between – people who are coming to the site on a regular basis but haven’t gotten over the ‘pay for access’ hump.

Viewsub gives these people a way to access paywalled content without spending money to do so.  If they like that content and are coming all the time, then they are more likely to convert into paying subscribers as well.