How Web Advertising May Go 229
Anti-Globalism sends us to Ars Technica for Jon Stokes's musing on the falling value of Web advertising. Stokes put forward the outlying possibility — not a prediction — that ad rates could fall by 40% before turning up again, if they ever do. "A web page, in contrast, is typically festooned with hyperlinked visual objects that fall all over themselves in competing to take you elsewhere immediately once you're done consuming whatever it is that you came to that page for. So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention. ... We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV, and, most importantly, millennia to build business models based on scarcity. In contrast, our collective effort to monetize post-scarcity digital media have only just begun."
Re:I still wonder about Google (Score:2, Informative)
there's a fallacy in there (Score:3, Informative)
We've had a few hundred years to learn to monetize print, over 75 years to monetize TV, and, most importantly, millennia to build business models based on scarcity.
thing is, there's no scarcity any more, or, I should rather say, the scarcity is not in the resources themselves, but rather on the sharing of the token called money used to obtain goods and services.
The current monetary system based on debt creates virtual scarcity, and doesn't really mean anything anymore. it's time to evolve.
http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/ [thezeitgeistmovement.com]
As a former Internet marketer (Score:5, Informative)
I always get a kick out of these sorts of articles.
Advertising on the internet comes from the same premises as advertising anywhere else. Either you are building awareness or you are inciting the viewer to action, preferably both.
You buy ads based solely on if they are acheiving those two objectives. The value of an ad is from that alone. If your ads don't perform, pay less or stop. If they succeed, keep paying or even pay more to guarantee that they will continue to do so.
Sure, you can do interactive ad games, popups, popunders, little folding corner things, etc, but who cares unless your name sticks in their mind or it causes them to buy your stuff.
Sure, website operators will plaster their pages with ads, but who cares as long as your name stands out and people buy your stuff.
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The main benefit for online ads over any other kind of ad is that the advertiser can have enormous feedback on the success of the ad that would normally take hundreds of hours of focus groups and thousands of dollars of wasted money.
The key failing of online ads is that advertisers are morons that think that internet ads are some magical moneymaking device that will work by itself. You have to use that wonderful deluge of information to guide your purchases and campaigns.
If advertisers, as a whole, stay ignorant, the market will boom and crash. Just like ignorant stock traders, just like any herd of morons that think they've found a golden goose and then cook it.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Informative)
You don't have to block every single image.
There are Adblock filter subscriptions (ad server domains + regular expressions). I subscribed to 5 from them and update the lists every now and then. More than 99% of site advertising is blocked for me.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Informative)
*nods*
I'll see your advert iff:
* You don't use client-side JavaScript to insert it into the page.
* It's not a Flash ad.
* It's not HUGE. (mail.yahoo.com: I'm glaring in your direction.)
* The host you use to serve the ad has *never* shown me an annoying, flashy "OMG YOU MAY HAVE WON AN IPOD" style ad. (doubleclick.net and RealMedia.com are right out, sorry.)
Re:Anyone actually BUY anything because of web ads (Score:1, Informative)
You've never bought anything from an ad, therefore they don't work. QED.
Oh, yet here we are, with people spending billions on web advertising... The fact they work is demonstrated by the fact that they're still around.
cf spam.