Your donations are very special to me. They build community. They tell me what I’m doing matters to you. They keep WOLF STREET open to all and less dependent on ads. Thank you!!!
Dear Readers,
Thank you so much for your many generous donations to WOLF STREET since the donation reminder Sunday a week ago. Many of you also donated throughout the year. Thank you!! Many of you have supported WOLF STREET for years. Thank you!!
Your awesome support of WOLF STREET is very special to me. It warms my heart. It tells me that what my WOLF STREET media mogul empire is doing in its little corner matters to you. Your donations show me part of the community that I might not see otherwise, which is wonderful.
Your donations over the years have allowed me to cut back on the ads. There are now fewer ads, and the ads are less intrusive, and they load faster, and they don’t mess up the comments anymore.
Online advertising has turned into a race to the bottom for publishers – including me, the little guy between the boots of giants.
To survive, publishers have erected paywalls, one after the other. Those that have not, such as Buzzfeed, may not survive on advertising alone. Many respected sites with lots of traffic have already shut down. Each year, the ads pay publishers less and less because the “ad tech” business takes an ever-larger piece of the pie. Everyone from the advertiser on down through multiple layers of ad tech companies considers the publisher just an unpleasant expense that needs to be cut.
But your many donations make WOLF STREET less dependent on ads, and they allow me to keep the site open and free to all, with no portion behind a paywall. That was my dream when I started the site. And I want it that way now more than ever. I want everyone around the globe to be able to dive right in.
And your donations have been super-crucial to keeping the site open and building a wonderful and growing community of readers. Thank you!
If you haven’t had a chance to donate yet…
If you were busy or on vacation a week ago and missed all the fun, let me remind you now:
Three ways to donate:
- Zelle (if you use it): it’s fast and free. Please contact me at howlatwolfstreet@gmail.com to get my Zelle info.
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- Mail a check (also much appreciated):
Wolf Street Corp
1288 Columbus Ave. #196
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Thank-you gift: a WOLF STREET mug if you donate $100 or more:
I will send you one of our new 12-oz glass mugs (have a look at it here) to thank you for your very generous donation of $100 or more if your address is in the US, and if you would like a mug.
The wraparound art on the mug – created by San Francisco artist Erika Kitten Lopez – shows a funny wolf, me, howling, “Nothing goes to Heck in a Straight Line.”
If you would like a mug, please email me; include your shipping address in the US (I cannot ship outside the US) and phone number (FedEx will not deliver without it). Send the email to: howlatwolfstreet@gmail.com
Thank you, Dear Readers, for your support and for forming this awesome and community around WOLF STREET!
Wolf Richter
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Tried 3 times to give using my VISA card. USAA Bank declined. Is there some way to change that so that it will accept? I checked address, phone number and credit card number.
Sorry for your troubles. This happens occasionally.
My recommendation: use Zelle through your bank or credit union. Most banks and credit unions participate in it, and if yours does, it’s a good way to go, and it’s free for both of us. After you set it up at your bank, it’s quick and easy to send and receive money.
If you go that route, email me at howlatwolfstreet@gmail.com and I will send you my Zelle info for the transfer.
Pay Pal worked 👍
The ad tech industry is unknown to us outsiders. Might be a good subject for a full article as seen from the view of a small publisher.
Ad tech is an interest of mine, so a really, really quick-and-dirty (with tons of gaps)…
1) Sites like Wolf’s rely on display advertising, which nowadays is likely to be handled via so-called programmatic exchanges – where thousands of advertisers buy ad placement from hundreds of thousands of websites. Sorta like a stock exchange for ad placement.
2) There are somewhat unavoidable intermediaries in this process, who all take a cut of website publishers’ potential revenue (think 7% to 12% each)…
A) The exchanges themselves. There are a lot, but the biggest tend to be owned by companies like Google (which actually makes the *bulk* of its revenue from *search* advertising…which is distinct from Wolf’s display advertising…but Google is very big in display advertising *exchanges* as well).
B) The big advertisers still (perhaps foolishly) rely heavily on ad agencies for “media buying” using DSPs (demand side platform software) to tie into the ad exchanges (for bidding, analytics, etc). Think Mad Men, but with geeks.
C) The hundreds of thousands of ad selling website publishers have their own aggregating intermediaries who supply SSPs (supply side platforms) that tie into the ad exchanges from the publishers/suppliers side. Just think geeks.
D) Sometimes there are standalone web server companies that store, deliver, track the tens of billions of ads flying around in microseconds every day for the preceding players.
E) Sometimes there are standalone analytics companies that try to optimize ad spend for the advertisers and ad revenue for the web site publishers.
Two or three industry analyses over the last 7 or 8 years indicate that these intermediaries (in aggregate) may drain off as much as 50% of advertiser spend that might have gone to publishers.
Up to a point, there probably should be more disintermediation going on, but the operational/financial details are unique to each player.
The common currency of internet display advertising tends to be the CPM – the price that website publishers charge for 1000 displays of an ad.
Vast ad supply via the internet has driven CPM prices way, way down (the Facebooks of the world, with billions of ad spaces to sell every day, frequently get under $1 CPMs for plain vanilla traffic/deals)
In ye olde network TV days, $10 CPMs for vanilla TV show placement were common.
But there were only 3 broadcast networks selling a US audience of 200 million plus.
Those networks got mind-blowingly, nation-warpingly rich and powerful. If Bill Gates and Leni Riefenstahl had a mutant love child, it was NBC, CBS, and ABC in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and most of the 90’s.
When America’s post mortem is written in a few decades, TV media induced dementia (1950 – 1995) will figure prominently.
(There are also cost-per-action internet ad sales for things like user clickthrough, etc…but display advertising is mainly that…payment for simple displaying of ads alone).
There is a ton more detail, and the definitive book on internet advertising has yet to be written…
Your #1 is only partially the case. Yes, some of the ads here are from ad exchanges; but other ads are from my ad agency, they’re from clients that my ad agency obtained through direct sales — not via exchanges. But even there, the intermediaries get in between. For example, my ad agency uses the Google platform to deliver its own direct ads to my site, do the performance tracking, etc.
Wolf,
Considering that in many ways advertising is one of the few viable business models for the internet ecosystem (notwithstanding the mini-rise of substack and the like), you might really want to think about doing an updated post detailing the internet ad ecosystem from the inside.
I vaguely recall one from years ago.
With the rise of programmatic\exchanges and the looming death of third party cookies, there is a lot of fairly interesting stuff going on.
(For instance…just started hearing about massive publisher hoards of *first party* cookies…which if it is what I think it is…sounds *worse* than the existing cookie surveillance state.)
The ad “exchange” angle really is finance adjacent and my guess is that many of your readers may have seriously toyed with the idea of launching their own blogs/etc. The whole money-side of running a blog/site really is a pretty fascinating topic.
Done! Thanks for all you do!
You kept us from losing a bunch of money on bitcoin. I guess we owe you a little bit of what we didn’t lose. :)
Thanks for your excellent work.
!) Change is good : fruits, green leaf and tomatoes, a glass of water every morning will keep the doctors away. Red meat, coffee and alcohol are good for the healthcare and the insurance sectors.
2) Change is good : extract the wind and sun energy instead of dirty oil and coal.
3) Change is good : Mr Gorbachev tear down this wall. We expanded our
frontiers to Poland, Hungary and Ukraine, bringing them peace and prosperity.
4) Change is good : after China devastated our steel mills we replaced them with art on the walls, colleges and healthcare.
5) Change is good : after opening China and signing NAFTA M1& M2 stalled. Shortages and bottle necks brought us inflation. Inflation might revive M1 & M2.
6) Change is good : from negative rates to 7% brought pain to the housing sector.
7) Change is good : SCO built a wall between China and US to depose king dollar.
8) US and China leaders met for three hours and disqus moderation .
9) Change is good : after being devastated by creepto Gen Z and
millennial have to pay $1.6T students loans, after three years in accumulation. “The gov lied to us, we are not paying”.
Thank you, Wolf!
Amazing, valuable, asset to the larger community, been reading the WSJ since a kid, numbers don’t lie, rear view millionaire i am
Thank you and all the wise men who comment.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Love your work Wolf. I will donate, but why don’t you convert to paid subscription service? Donations allow the ungrateful to be subsidized by the grateful. I think that you would be pleasantly surprised at how many would gladly pay, and you could be well compensated in the aggregate.
I rather have the 600,000+ readers a month that the site has now, than the 20,000 readers a month that it might have behind a paywall.
Here is what I said above, and I mean it:
Donations “…allow me to keep the site open and free to all, with no portion behind a paywall. That was my dream when I started the site. And I want it that way now more than ever. I want everyone around the globe to be able to dive right in.”
“And your donations have been super-crucial to keeping the site open and building a wonderful and growing community of readers. Thank you!”
You know, it’s my dream to have 1 million readers a month. Someday maybe 2 million. It’s not all about money :-]
Thanks for all you do Wolf. It’s a pleasure reading your site every day.
I saw a headline the other day that read “The Key to Avoiding High Interest Rates? Buy Homes with Cash.” This was found in a so-called reputable business periodical.
As the quality of journalism declines nearly everywhere, it gets better at WolfStreet.
Sent plain old cash by mail (in a plain brown wrapper). Hope it got there. Definitely worth it for all your hard work.
Figured I’d freeloaded long enough. The bare charts and numbers imply that we’re smart enough to figure stuff out without all the experts telling us what we ought to see. My only problem is figuring out how Wolf has enough hours in the day to dig up and present all the info that he does. But that adds to my appreciation.
Hey Wolf, I figured I’d throw out a report from today referencing Fed’s Mary Daly…. It’s reported she said:
DALY: REAL-WORLD IMPACT OF FED RATE HIKES LIKELY HIGHER THAN WHAT CURRENT RATE TARGET IMPLIES
DALY: FINANCIAL MARKETS PRICED LIKE FED FUNDS RATE AT 6%, NOT 3.75%-4.00%
DALY: FED MUST BE MINDFUL OF RISK OF TIGHTENING POLICY TOO MUCH
DALY: FED HAS MORE WORK TO DO WHEN IT COMES TO RATE HIKES
DALY: FED POLICY IS IN MODESTLY RESTRICTIVE TERRITORY
DALY: LATEST INFLATION DATA MOVING IN RIGHT DIRECTION
DALY: FED MUST GET THE JOB DONE ON RATE HIKES BUT NOT OVERDO IT
Whats does this mean and more importantly, WHY would she says it?
Why didn’t you quote the parts where she said that the rate may go over 5%?? And the part where she said that inflation is far from over?? And that one month doesn’t change anything?? Or the part where she said that the Fed is still a ways from being done?
What kind of BS are you trying to pull here with this cherry-picked stuff?
Read her entire speech.
But Yes, QT has the effect of rate hikes. QT is “tightening.” I have said that all year, despite all the tightening deniers out there. Why is this suddenly noteworthy to you that Daly agrees with what everyone knows and with what I’ve said all year?
Well over a year ago, I said the Fed might not have to raise more than 4% if it uses enough QT. So now the Fed is going well over 4% and it’s doing QT. And at some point, this is going to have an effect on inflation.
And why the heck are you posting this in this thread???
I buy a $500 gift card at my local supermarket and use it to purchase things on the Internet, given how insecure things are out there. For example, my BOA AAA VISA card has been hacked 5 times by Amazon and other lowlifes. The gift card is just a debit card which also works for such things as donations to Wolf’s Web site. No one can steal more than the $500 and there is no impact on your credit file. And if someone does hack it, like Amazon did, twice, then they get your money back, although the process takes longer.
THanks for awesome reporting.
I’d send my dues soon :-)
Thanks for the excellent blog, Wolf. You manage to be very informative, have a great knack for knowing the most critical info to feature, and do a great job of keeping this non-political. I also like the fact that you lived and worked in the real world, like your stint at the car dealership. I think that gives you an edge in knowing what info really matters and what does not.
Thank you. Music to my ears.
Where’s my beer mug! Thanks for the great work Wolf!
You want one? You need to let me know, send me your shipping address in the US, and include your phone number because FedEx will not deliver without out it.
You already received an email from me on Nov 16. Just reply to it with your shipping info and phone number. Cheers!!
Thanks for all you do Wolf!!