Banner Ads Are Bad Content
from the no-wonder-they-suck dept
A few months back, we started a series of posts on the topic of adveritisng being the same thing as content, meaning that if the content sucks, it won't be very effective as advertising. So, it should come as no surprise that those who rely on banner or "display" ads for revenue are discovering that the business is hitting a rough patch. It certainly worked for a while, in the "gold rush" phase. However, these days there's a ton of ad blindness out there -- and that's because most banner ads suck as content. And, before anyone brings it up in the comments -- yes, we do have banner ads on this site -- and that's for a few reasons. First, while it may suck for the advertisers, it's still lucrative for publishers (though, that can't last unless the content gets better). So, we might as well take advantage of that. But, more importantly, it's a tiny fraction of our revenue, and it's been more useful from an educational standpoint than as a revenue generator. We're certainly not relying on bad advertising as a business model, and have done a few small scale experiments in trying to try out some ad banners that are somewhat more useful. Still, I worry about the many sites that do rely on such advertising. Advertising has always been something of a cyclical market, and with so many companies now relying on pure display advertising, it may get pretty ugly. At some point, the advertising industry has to realize that simply putting up useless (or, worse, annoying) banner ads isn't particularly effective.
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Filed Under: ads are content, banner ads, display ads
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What really annoys me about vertical banners is that some sites have them in a fixed spot on the page and if I enlarge a picture on another portion of the page it runs under the banner.
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"it's been more useful from an educational standpoint than as a revenue generator."
Please explain how 'you have 3 emails waiting for you' or 'you are the millionth visitor to this site' is anyway educational? The flashyness of it all may be stimulating (and yet ugly as hell) but its not educational.
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Re:
Well, first off, we would never accept such forms of advertising, so that's not what we have. Techdirt's staff has turned down ads that we felt were unacceptable or disruptive to the user experience.
What's been educational is learning how the ad process works, and understanding how different ad serving technologies work.
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Re: adblock
FWIW, the only reason why I use adblock on both FF and Safari is because I'm sick of ads that rely on flash and remote javascript that jack up my CPU usage and slow my browser to a crawl. Having a relatively powerful machine brought to its knees by intrusive advertising is not merely annoying, but abusive.
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Re:
(disable adblock, flashblock, noscript)
Still don't see 'em
(start iexplore)
Oh, now I see 'em.
Maybe the market is starting to suck 'cos internet users are starting to cop-on and starting to block the annoyingly intrusive ads?
Adds that say "Buy This" are fine, like they are in a newspaper or magazine. Adds that having things flying around, whirling, blinking, scrolling, trying to grab my attention - too annoying. Nab my interest, don't steal my attention.
e.g. MS & Dell, OK not so bad
American Express - no thanks!
and now back to FF...
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I'm glad that ads aren't your main revenue source. If Google ever read these comments they would realise that the ads don't work here.
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I occasionally wonder what percentage of clicks per view occur out there. Obviously, the business is working, but I would have never thought it'd be as lucrative as it is. (As least on the ad server's side.) I personally haven't ever intentionally followed an ad link. The only times I really can't just glaze over them (read: oblivious) is when they're extremely obnoxious or pop open a new window over/behind my current one.
From the former category, I recently noticed one that even insulted me. It read, between some annoying flashing, "Are you dumb? You might be. Take the dumb quiz." Aside from questioning the purpose of such a worthless site (which I can sadly imagine), I thought it was pretty idiotic for one, the site displaying the ad, and two, the business which produced the ad. I tend to find myself avoiding site with such advertisements if at all possible. (Which really just proves your point, at least in my case.)
It's amazing how much production there is in the market. Without ads, 30 minute TV shows would last 24 minutes, web pages would load faster and I'd get 90% less postal mail and 99% less email. I'm surprised that the revenue exceeds the costs in all honesty. There certainly must be a lot of fools out there because so much advertising is incredibly superfluous and wasteful. Obviously people are responding to them, though. It seems to me that most businesses are doing things in ineffective ways (and sometimes even in a negative capacity) than serving them well.
My thoughts, anyway.
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OpenX gives the publisher much more freedom to run the advertising on their site by themselves instead of relying on costly 3rd parties, making it possible to run free campaigns for others or as a testbed. You could combine it with Amazon's S3 if you have a short campaign but with a lot of impressions, making an expensive EDS hosting redundant.
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adblock
wow, I didn't know that.
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free content?
On the other hand, I'm not so naive as to think that full time jouralists and writers can live without money from the site and I'd be happy to pay a subscription for quality content if the ad business model fails.
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It's about time, Mike!
Yeah, yeah. Banner ads aren't what you were talking about in the first place, but I'm still standing on my point about mixing ads and content will ultimately fail because consumers don't want it.
While I do agree it can be done effectively, it can not be done for all media types. Please research the "Stride" episode of "Smallville" for proof.
Another question I want to pose to you is why in the hell is there a Flash block on this site (upper left)? I'm not going to click the thing, but it's getting annoying. Take it off, please.
Ads are something people are getting tired of dealing with. Back in the day, it was common to sit through them but now that they're invasive, longer, and much more annoying, the ad-blocking software of the web and DVR skipping isn't a coincidence any business should ignore.
Yet they do (points to the banner ads). I'm glad you feel these ads are educational for you, but most would rather see them gone completely, especially those that are "inclusive" to blog listings (which I'll see the moment I hit submit).
*sigh*
I'm still waiting to see your picture perfect example of the marriage between content and ads. Sorry, but this site doesn't really count because what you're "advertising" isn't what you're selling.
Unless you're selling ads about the stupidity of Corporate America, which would be classic irony of your customer base.
;)
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Re: It's about time, Mike!
I have seen ads that make for good content. My favorite are the "I'm a Mac" commercials from apple. They're basically short little films that make fun of Windows and advertise neat things about a Mac. I actively seek to watch those.
I've never seen an add on Techdirt, I have Flash enabled, and I don't use any special software. Just lucky, I guess.
But the final point is that Techdirt *is* advertising what they're selling. What do they do here? They report the news, yeah, but more importantly they give their opinions and back it up with analysis. What is it they sell? That's right, their expertise and analysis. So by giving away examples of their expertise in the form of these very useful commentary articles (and engaging in dialog throughout the comments), they'd advertising that they know what they're talking about and if you'd like they can apply that to your own business problems specifically (for a modest fee).
I don't see how it's ironic to tell your customers, "you need help, and we can give it to you."
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Flashy ads
So I scrolled to the bottom and clicked on Print to get the printer version without ads.
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Adveritisng [sic]
Because, boy howdy, do I really hate "adveritisng".
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Re: Adveritisng [sic]
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Advertising: The noisy drunken party crasher
But once it gets inside, it wants more. As quickly as it can, advertising takes on the role of a loudmouth, drunken, party crasher who noisily interrupts the conversations of others with its boring, pointless "stories"...
When that happens, I ask my friend Ad Blocker to help me escort the pest out the door...
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Re: Advertising: The noisy drunken party crasher
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Some ads are great...banners got to go!
The banner ads on some sites are dreadful though! They've got to go!
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advertising
Having said all this, it would be nice if there were a place where advertising was honest. ...I must have taken too much medication. It would actually give me information I could use.
--Glenn
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Advertising
I had to actively click on a "Stop ad" button to be able to check my mail!
If "content is king", how much did Yahoo get to voluntarily have its own content blocked by an ad?
Anyway, back to banner ads:
I've always been fascinated by banner-ad campaigns. It seems like companies want to run banner ads on a site simply because it has "eyeballs" and "traffic". Do the ad companies not care about what kind of traffic? Do they not care that they won't get any clicks... and if they do get clicks, will anyone actually buy anything?
Or, in the case of the flashing "you've already won" banner ads, was this campaign designed to convince people that banner ads should be blocked? :)
I also remember when the "you have a virus" banner ad campaign was ruled illegal because it was panicking people. What kind of advertising company comes up with a campaign like this? Sure, people will click on the banner, out of sheer panic, but they won't buy anything or download the product.
Or is that the real "product" of banner ads: delivering clicks without the needs for delivering purchases. I can only imagine the marketing department raving about how their banner ad got 10,000 clicks... yet the sales department only reported 2 sales.
Ah, yes, but this is the internet, where "eyeballs" are king and Yahoo can have a market cap five times the value of Ford or Nissan. Who cares if you don't manufacture a physical product: just keep getting those eyeballs to your site!
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2001 were the days
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Branding Play
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