Revisiting Online Advertising
We’ve long established that online ads suck. More often than not, they are ugly and get in the way of what we’re trying to accomplish. But it’s time to look a bit past that part, and start focusing on the context in which ads are being displayed. There is still seems to be quite a bit to learn about the online population and how they interact with advertisements. In other words, when and where is the best time to place ads?
Joshua Porter wrote a great post about why social ads don’t work, and he raises great points further think about.
Social ads don’t work as well because people are being social, not searching for something.
This is spot on. Think of one time you were browsing your social network of choice and thought about clicking an ad? For me it’s extremely rare, and I’d imagine that a large percentage of other people feel the same. Ads seems to work much better on sites where your attention span isn’t required for long. Social sites don’t support this model. You can spend hours browsing profiles and interacting with the site, so force feeding ads won’t work because they are not within context of the users habits on the site. It’s like invading personal space. Have you ever had someone knock on your door trying to sell something, while you’re watching tv?
Search sites (like Yahoo, Google, etc.) are a little different, which seems to be why their ads are more effective. People are looking for something specific. When the results are displayed, they are either seeing relevant ads, or relevant search results. It’s within context. The user clicks the ad or result, then leaves.
News portals might fall between social sites and search sites, however, I’d say with user habits, they’re closer to social networking sites. I would imagine your average user goes to a news site to read news and/or just browse headlines.
But certainly search sites aren’t the only types of places where online advertising can work, so where else does this online advertising model fit in? How can more companies get a ROI on the millions of dollars being spent for online ads and stay within context of users habits per site? I don’t really have an answer for that one, but as the web is still new, there is lots to learn for advertisers, as well as those displaying ads on their sites.