Calling The Digital Ad Industry; Let's Start Taking Banners Off Web Pages

Now, before everyone who works for an ad exchange, banner ad network, RTB or yield optimization firm flips their shit and calls me susie, just hear me out.  I want to make a case for removing advertising from our sites, and I'm a seller, so in theory I want that space.

First, for this entire rant, let's immediate remove the following ad products from the conversation because they are separate; pull downs, peel backs, expandable home page units, page skins, takeovers, etc.  What I'm talking about is your everyday standard IAB banners.

Let's just say we wanted to start driving up the value of ad inventory again (gasp, why would we want that).  I don't think anyone would argue that there is more banner space available than the market is demanding.  Fair to say, you can go to any major website, navigate 15 pages in and there are still leaderboards and skyscrapers everywhere.  Now, those useless placements are selling for pennies on ad exchanges and optimizers are crunching every penny in real time bidding environments to very slightly outbid someone else's minute spend threshold.  I'm making the case that if we move back to a model where we minimalized overall ad frequency and touch points in banners, we on the publishing side would maintain higher quality of advertiser and higher pricepoint.  Adversely, advertisers now avoid ad clutter and actually get their message across.  Lastly, consumers don't suffer from advertising overload and they actually respond to messaging like they did in the good old days.  Keep the level of targeting up but reduce ad clutter, I think you see better performance.

My focus is in video, and I have strong concerns about the commodization of long tail video.  There is no doubt that premium video inventory (I'm talking pre-roll only) will always command a high pricepoint.  It's a unique one on one interaction.  But the price is being driven down by exchanges drudging up video inventory and shipping it off for pennies, yet the value of the placement remains high.  Yes there was another subtle point in there; price and value are two different things.

On an aside, can someone tell me if ad exchanges are actually making money?  How many ways can you slice up a penny?