The reason for your low click through rates

If you manage a community or sell ads online you’ll be shocked varying levels of quality found in ads submitted by advertisers to pitch your community.  You may then have then had a conversation with some of these advertisers about click through performance. 

Sure, you could give them raw data that shows other ads in that spot perform well, but who believes raw data… how about truly democratizing ads?  I saw this recently on CNET…

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No, I’m not talking about the fact that Apple turfed the Microsoft section, I’m talking about the little feedback link that takes me to…

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Unfortunately this is a good idea that’s just poorly implemented. Why not just borrow from digg style simplicity and simply have a Thumbs Up/Down above ads that registers votes? 

Lets take that one step further up the chain. What could you do with the data you collected about ads?  I know what I would do on my community. 

I’d want to give advertisers that reach a certain threshold of thumbs up more impressions and penalize the ones who get thumbs down. This way the community gets to help choose how they are pitched to.  Crazy?