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."
In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
.. but unfortunately just doesn't seem to be.. these are some of the major failings I see in online advertising today:
Inconsistency! This to me is a huge one. Back in the day.. you'd be surfing your favourite site.. and you'd see the same ad over and over. Every day, there it would be. Sooner or later you'd get curious and click on it.. and the odd rare time, you would find a product that generally interested you. You don't see that any more. Now every time you visit the site.. a completely different set of random ads shows up. There is no longer that cumulative curiosity.
Relevancy! Ok.. google's adsence has made a lot of headway in this area... but automated tools (even really freaking complex ones) simply can't replace a web aster finding a product on his.her own that he/she feels visitors will want.
Slow freaking ad servers! Back in the day (cough) .. the ad was hosted on the same server as the rest of the page. Users didn't have to wait for some slow overloaded ad server.
Only getting paid on "confirmed purchases". To me this is a rip of for webmasters. The few times I have bought something I saw advertised on a web page.. I didn't access it through the ad. I googled for it later when a need for such product arose. Ads don't usually have an immediate effect imo .. they are cumulative. You see a product name over and over.. and eventually decide to buy it. You see the same ad for some web host every time you visit a site.. then one day you need web hosting.. and the name pops up. Chances are you are not going to go click on the ad.. but non the less the ad was effective.
Just being freaking irritating. The latest craze is these hover over links. Every time I see one.. I feel like heating up a steel spring with a blow torch, then carefully sliding it up the webmasters nose. Stuff like this encourages people to install ad blockers. Back when ads were un-intrusive.. most people didn't bother with ad blockers. Now though.. browsing the web without some kind of blocker is an experience in pain... and unfortunately the nice ads that don't annoy users get blocked along with everything else.
Anyway, that is enough drunken 3am rambling!
That's an assumption (Score:5, Interesting)
That assumes you even saw, or had the ability to see the ad in the first place. I block popups, surf anonymously via a disposable OS (virtualization), and use Firefox with Adblock Plus. My exposure to actual advertisements is extraordinarily minimal. I almost forgot they existed till this article came out.
Most people are not much different either. I suspect the value of the web advertisement is going down because the number of eyeballs actually seeing them is in a free fall. When advertisement campaigns cannot deliver any meaningful increases in sales or leads then their value must go down.
If people are not seeing the ads, how can it possibly lead to a sale, lead, click-thru, click-on, whatever, blah blah blah
Anyone actually BUY anything because of web ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been surfing the web for at least 12 years. I've probably hit dozens of ad-infested pages per day during that time. I've probably seen tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of ads.
I can't remember a single time when I actually purchased something because of a web page ad.
I may have been influenced a bit due to a few of them, but actual purchase that I wouldn't have made otherwise? If so I have forgotten about it.
Re:More intrusive ads for the same revenue? (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean, like ummm, like paying not see advertisements right? *sarcasm*
That's like PAYING FOR PORN . You don't have too. Surfing the net without advertisements is as easy as getting free pictures of boobies on Google.
P.S - A little known fact is that 15-20% of all tcp/ip packets ultimately end up displaying a tit, nipple, ass, etc. It's true.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
International Nature of the Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
Has left pretty well all these Ad merchants behind.
If I'm browsing some site in say the USA and I'm based in Europe I don't give a **** about ads for US services (and most products come to think of it). They just don't have any relevance to me whatsoever and just consumes the bandwith/download quota I PAY FOR every month.
Very few sites check your IP for location and serve you up an Ad free page if you are outside their target location on this wonderful planet of ours.
Don't get me started on the ever increasing number of sites that are replicating the sort of things that doubleclick does. Last month I added 78 new ones to my hosts files to block.
AFAIAC (As far as I am concerned), these people are signing their own death warrant. Eventually people will say 'Enough is enough' and start browsing only those sites with a reasonable (or zero) levels of ads. One site I visited recently had over 20, yes 20 other sites it was pulling ads and other crap from. Why do they do this? Greed obviously.
This business model is surely untennable for the future. Sorta like the 'sub-prime mortgages' that were sold to far to many inappropriate people.
I have personal (i.e. anecdotal) evidence of... (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that in this economy, overall, more people are going to cut back on advertising budgets rather than expand. I think that in the case of Google, it's hidden by their growing market share and the growth of the Internet.
Re:As a former Internet marketer (Score:1, Interesting)
100% Correct. As a developer working at an online ad agency, the one thing that online advertising campaigns give you is accountability. In a down economy, you want to make the best of your money. When advertisers spend marketing dollars on television, radio, print ads, billboards, etc., there is very little insight into how well that money is working out for them.
When you spend your money online, with strong strategy and analytics, you can see what exactly is working and what isn't. You can take that data and optimize your website and campaigns, whether they are display ads, paid search, or organic.
If anything, companies will increase their online advertising budgets.
Re:More intrusive ads for the same revenue? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a battle you cannot hope to win in the medium to long term; ad-blocking software can always, in principle, deceive the site itself in the same way that a television viewer can get up and make a sandwich. Ad-blocking software can just ensure the client looks and acts, from the server's point of view, like any non-blocking client.
So why bother trying? You'll simply force ad blockers to actually download ads the user will never see, increasing costs for everyone.
Re:I still wonder about Google (Score:3, Interesting)
It would seem that the market wonders that too [google.com]; GOOG has lost 51% of its value over the last 12 months. Compare to Microsoft (MSFT [google.com]), which even with the Vista debacle was down by less (41%) over the same time period.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why people are so bothered by ads.
Me, I hardly ever see them. My brain has a filter that blocks all the ads, so that they never register in my consciousness. It's almost as efficient as the "skip" button on my VCR; I just focus on the entertainment and ignore the commercials. I don't understand why other people don't have similar mental filters?
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:2, Interesting)
Over the past few weeks I've been experimenting with NoScript and AdBlock, but I find they are too much hassle. Oftentimes a website requires Flash and/or Javascript to be operational, and these two programs block those items. Therefore I have to go into the settings and click "okay for this site" in order to make it work properly.
It's reached the point where I'd rather just have the "ease" of webads versus constantly fiddling with NoScript or AdBlock settings trying to make broken sites operate. Besides, ads pay for the expense of whichever sites I'm visiting (like slashdot). Free is better than subscription.
Online Ads - An Advertising Perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
I live and work in technology in New York. Back in the day I built e-commerce sites, but post dot-bomb I perforce moved into advertising. And as a consultant I have sat in the meetings with the tastemakers in many of the biggest Ad firms, such as McCann-Erickson (makers of the Mastercard "Priceless!" Ads), Ogilvy & Mather, JWT, etc, so I have some perspective on the question of web advertising.
First, let's get the common perception of an overarching, sinister council meeting in smoke-filled rooms to figure out how to manipulate the minds of America out of the way. The tastemakers are hipsters, almost all White, almost all male, in their 30's or younger, and far fewer of them are gay than you would think. They are voracious, almost desperate consumers of popular culture and are nearly all filled with self-loathing because they work in advertising instead of producing any of that popular culture.
At the moment they're all desperately trying to figure out how to monetize online, mobile, and gaming because print is terminal; out-of-home (that's billboards, bus shelter posters, etc) is limited; and the only people who still watch TV in respectable numbers are the least desirable demographic, that is, Baby Boomers in their 50's and 60's. The trendlines for middle-to-upper-middle income males ages 18-45 all show that they're abandoning in droves the activities that have been the mainstays for decades, such as TV watching and sports. So clients are demanding that Ad firms present them with good digital strategies.
But they are woefully ill-prepared to do so, because within the Ad agencies themselves the TV crowd still rules the roost and so does their "you'll take what I give you and like it" mentality. They do not fundamentally understand that within the digital media consumers have vastly more ability to shape what content they see, and how they see it. That is, they do understand that in digital consumers have that ability, but they have no idea what to do or how to behave in that brave new world.
Instead, they double-down on the same old tactics of interruption ("we'll be right back after these messages!"). That's why when TiVo got big advertisers responded by putting those annoying banners at the bottom of the screen during shows, and by making every show a walking product placement; you cannot TiVo those out. And at the moment they're on the eve of hammering the final nail in the coffin of the TV medium by forcing their last demographic, the Boomers, to switch their sets to those able to receive a digital signal. Little do they realize that will make it exponentially easier for consumers to edit out all of the banner and product placement crap and re-post and share them through P2P, while also alienating the elderly who might just remember that they used to play golf and bridge instead of watching TV all night.
That's why it's easy to predict which way web advertising will go: it will be relevant to the consumer's needs, or it will die. There is no place for the interruptive, one-way communication that the TV crowd in the Ad agencies are trying to push, because consumers can very easily switch all that off with AdBlock and the like. One-way, interruptive will not survive on the web, it will not survive on the mobile platform, and it will not survive in gaming. The days of forcing males, 18-45, to sit through tampon commercials are over.
Google has made some progress on serving relevant ads with AdSense, and they have prospered accordingly. But the problem lies deeper than the medium through which commercial messages are delivered. The corporations of the world, at least the ones more than 20 years old, still want to live in a top-down, command-and-control environment where they call all the shots. They want to produce goods and services that people will pay for, but they do not want the rabble to actually talk back to them.
But in digital media, that's precisely what consumers have grown to demand under the democratizing influence of the Web. They demand a
Re:usefulness and trust (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless we move to a totally amateur system, there needs to be some way for professional publishers to get paid for their work.
The only method that avoids any conflict of interest is if the consumer of the media pays directly for its use. But the subscription model is breaking down as the web democratises publishing. Only a suitable micropayment system can save it.
Other ways of funding media are either becoming unsustainable, such as pushing distracting ads, or potentially compromise publishers' independence (negotiating advertising directly with product makers, or receiving revenue from (rarely disclosed) affiliate relationships).
I'm in favour of funding professional media by bonuses that product makers pay for the help they give to consumers, done in a way that is both fully-disclosed and buffers media from dealing with the bonus payers. Here's [rbate.com] a summary.
Other than search ads, online is doomed (Score:3, Interesting)
There are ads that appear with search results, which are valuable to both advertiser and reader. And then there's everything else, which is merely annoying.
Search ads are valuable because they're presented when the user is looking for something and are relevant to the search. At that one moment in time, an ad isn't an interruption of other activity. That's why Google is so successful.
Google ads on other sites, though, are mostly noise. The overall quality of Google contextual advertisers is low. [sitetruth.net] For most serious advertisers, opting out of the Google Content Network, but keeping the search ads, is a good move. Especially since the discovery that 10% of users generate 50% of the clicks, but don't buy much. [directmark...nsider.com]
Online ads may bring in enough revenue to keep your blog running, but they won't keep your car dealership afloat.
Re:In what should be pointing out the obvious (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the free TV sites won't work with NoScript enabled. Also I've found bankofamerica.com, chase.com, and discovercard.com don't work. Although I can understand your viewpoint I'm not willing to give up either free online videos at hulu.com, or access to my financial websites.
Another side effect is that as my "whitelist" surpassed one thousand listings, my Firefox ate more memory and was running more and more slowly. So I decided to turn off Noscript/Adblock. The slowdown was more annoying than the ads.