Slashdot Mirror
Internet Ad Network Commentary
Jonas Acres writes: "Lowtax of the [in]famous Something Awful has posted a commentary on the future of Internet advertising. It's a pretty interesting read. He's bounced from dying ad network to dying ad network, so he has a decent platform to preach from." I've also had to deal with a number of ad networks over the years - both for Slashdot prior to the Andover acquisition and a couple of other projects. It definitely sucks. Companies that break contracts, don't pay you, and never getting any return phone calls or anything is the norm that I dealt with.
"Advertisers, whom the entire Internet is funded by"
Excuse me? The Internet existed before it was allowed to be used for commercial purposes, much less advertising. Advertising is a Jonny-come-lately, trying to make money off of something, which has a strong culture against it.
That is the whole point of the article, you can't fund the Internet off of advertising.
Unfortunately, while this is a good short-term solution and helps your favored site today, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that the ad hasn't resulted in a sale for the company whose banner you clicked.
Sooner or later, that company's gonna realize that despite all the hits its website has gotten, nobody's buying anything. Despite all the money it's given to its ad agency, it hasn't gotten a return on its investment.
It stops doing business via banner ads. The ad agency goes titsup.com and stops paying per clickthrough, because each clickthrough is worth less to it.
And your favorite site still goes down because it doesn't have enough revenue.
I've got nothing against clicking on the odd banner as an act of charity to a webmaster. I do it myself from time to time. But I have no illusions that it's gonna solve The Problem.
and agree with Taco and others. Some form of advertising must be found that works on the Internet. If not, the Internet will become a much more boring place. Here's why:
/., something aweful, fuckedcompany and tons of others. This really isn't possible to do anywhere else and garner a large audience. It isn't likely, for example, that there could be a /. TV show. The problem is that as these sites become more popular, they become more expensive to run. Slashdot wouldn't do too well on a $29.95 Interland account. If advertising isn't around to pick up the bill (or at least some of it) then the site owners must somehow make money or just watch their business be crushed under it's own weight. Sell something you say? Well, if all of my time is spent dicking around filling orders or processing returns, there isn't much time to code, parse story submissions or write content. In any event, it's not clear that "selling something" is a panacea either. In short, people expect that there will be new articles on their favorite website and if the flow of new stuff stops, so will the flow of visitors. In my market segment, DIY home improvement, most of the retailers that "sold something" have gone bust: irenovate, cornerhardware and others. They "sold something" and had decent content. It didn't stop their slide into oblivion.
On the internet it's possible to build quirky, interesting sites like
"Well, fuck 'em then, they couldn't figure out a business model that works, let 'em go bust!" you say. Well, it's an easy thing to say but the reality of the Internet is that people come here to find free information. Plain and simple. The internet as an "entertainment medium" like TV just hasn't taken off. Sure, there's some funny and interesting stuff but that doesn't appear to me as the primary reason that people are getting online. It's for email (pretty much free) and to find stuff. This "stuff" is content. It's the reason you're on slashdot right now and it, too, is free. If the smaller content companies can't find a way to turn a buck, the Internet will devolve into the same colorless, odorless, tasteless content we are now force-fed on TV and every other medium. Each company that fails (aside from the clearly ridiculous) are another body on the bonfire and at some point, advertisers will get tired of the smell and leave. Hopefully we find something that works sooner than later.
Jakob Nielsen has been saying that ads on the net don't work since 1997. And he's right.
Furthermore ad stripping software like Adsubtract stop your browser from even asking for the ads.
It's only matter of time until people realize that those banner ads are sucking down the bandwith on their poor 56k modems. Once they find they can surf faster without the ads, it'll spead faster than All-Advantage...
-----
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Yeah, right, how was Internet funded before the web, then?
No, anonymity on the net is a relatively recent idea. Traditionally, anonymity has been scorn upon on the Internet. And the key difference between Internet and other media-types has always been the possibility of two-way communication. On the other hand, television promotes one way interaction between consumer and business.
Also, the tone through the article was that the Internet needs better targeting of ads. It doesn't. Perhaps the web needs it, but not even that is true. The only thing on the Internet that needs ads are .coms. And
personally, I don't care much about .com's.
Now what would happen to the web if the .coms died? Well, we would
retain all the interesting sites, such as content offered by
universities, personal pages, the gutenberg project, in short:
anything of real value! What would happen is that most stuff that
annoys us would be gone. Ads would be gone, lawyers would be gone,
domain-name wars would be gone, badly designed sites with company
graphics and too much javascript would be gone, and the bandwith would
still be there.
But even if one see .coms as something good, and not something bad,
there is the question of ads. People seem to have forgotten about
micropayments as an alternative to adverticing. But seriously, what do
you want? Pay 2 cents to access your favourite website, or have it
filled up with banners and popups? I would like a portion of those
micropayments, thank you!
The real problem with advertising, and especially online advertising, is that people have gotten so inured to it that nobody pays any attention to it any more. In other mediums this isn't quite so much of a problem - there are always new places and ways to attract attention, and innovative ploys by advertising companies still attract a fair amount of attention.
But who really looks at banner ads any more? They're so ubiquitious that they've become part of the background, and the amount of clickthroughs they're generating compared to the number of impressions is rediculously low. So of course all of these companies are going out of business without paying people.
I see this as a worrying trend though. There are plenty of really good sites out there that are supported solely through advertising rather than subscription or per-use charges, and if online advertising dies then many of these websites will disappear as their owners cannot afford the cost of hosting and bandwidth. It also doesn't help when people use things like Junkbuster to further eliminate any chance these companies have of making money.
At this rate it seems like the majority of free sites will either vanish or start having to charge for their services. I can easily imagine a day in the not-so-distant future where even /. has to start charging people in order to pay for the costs of running a website with hundreds of thousands of readers...
OK, something about your post just kind of got under my skin (not flammage, just a mild irritation).
Where, exactly, is the promise to anyone that creates a web site that they should be able to "make a return on their investment", especially a monetary return? I'm working with a group that has put up a site purely for the hope of getting our work out there. We don't want to have pop-ups, so we don't. We don't like banner ads, so we don't have them. Nowhere did we see, when we were setting up our web site, the guarantee that we would recieve any sort of compensation just for doing what we enjoy doing.
There seems to be this overwhelming mentality anymore that just by having a web presence you should be entitled to make money. It doesn't matter if your site sucks. It doesn't matter if you have absolutely no clue how to attract people. It doesn't matter if you have no revenue generation program of any sort. Just by being there, that should entitle you to make massive sums of money. I disagree with that mentality, and I know I'm not the only one.
The web started as a medium with relatively free information dispersal. And, in time, advertising agencies will come to terms with the fact that they have to be much more over-the-top, and in-your-face to make people see their ads on the web. If people aren't disgusted by it, then it may work. Here's an idea, do what they've done on TV and radio and make the ads entertaining. If there were any effort at all to make ads as entertaining as, say, the Bud character plays (with the frogs and lizards and feret) then maybe people wouldn't just ignore them. Just because you stick an ad on the page, that doesn't entitle you to any sort of monetary compensation. Do something to get people's attention in a way that doesn't just piss them off to no end.
Of course, having said all that I would say it is just a matter of time before the government cracks down on all this illegal software that blocks web ads. After all, we are destroying hard working ad companies if we ignore their ads. More and more it seems the most important thing in the world is to keep all the money we can moving towards the corporations and away from the people. Why corporations have so much more right to it than people in general I'm not quite sure. But I am sure that it's just a matter of time before it is law that advertising cannot be removed from web sites (just as TV is moving more and more towards a type of medium where ads cannot be ignored, or at least cannot be fast-forwarded through). It will take them some time, but it will happen.
I just don't quite get why it's so important that when you pay for your web connection, some people are even paying for bandwidth, you should still have to pay for content. With your cable bill you don't get charged extra for ads (unless you order a pay-per-view with lots of commercials, and they do exist, believe it or not). But with the Internet it seems that people feel they are entitled to monetary compensation just for throwing some words and pictures up on a page. It just seems wrong to me. You should have to work for money. The Internet is not the "get rich quick" scheme that many have made it out to be. You have to work just as hard to earn money this way as any other. It takes more than just saying, "I have a right to earn money dammit!" to actually earn money. I hope at some point people realize that. But more than likely the government will intervene on the behalf of the big corps and tell us that we are being criminals because we aren't just bowing down and handing over our paychecks to any moron that's in league with an ad agency.
It just seems stupid. But what the hell do I know. I'm not in it for the money. So I guess that means I'm evil, evil, evil!
------------
- networks can't provide user demographics
- advertisers don't know how to use the medium
but holds out hope these things may improve in time. However, Jakob Nielsen has been arguing for years that web advertising is inherently unworkable. See, for exampleThe nature of banner ads on the internet has always made them invisible to most readers. When the commercials come on, TV viewers hit the mute buttons, VCR viewers hit their fast forward buttons, and ReplayTV viewers hit Quick Skip. The world has learned (for the most part) to tune out the easily identifiable advertising. On the internet, it's even easier. At least with a TV, you pay attention to enough of the ads to know when you've returned to your show. Not so with a banner ad. It takes a miniscule amount of effort to read them, and their size/shape/color makes them instantly identifiable as something to be ignored. Even filter programs can identify them and eliminate them quite accurately (hurray for the Proxomitron!)
So, given that, what are the advertisers going to do now? Some will fold up their tents. The smarter ones will adapt. One of the cleverest approaches I've seen was on a mapping site. Midway through the printed instructions was the location of a WalMart store that we would be passing. I suspect advertising will have to take a more active role in content in order to command money. Think old-tyme TV shows, brought to you by Alpo; or more likely, the Truman Show (with Yummy Mocha Cocoa.) Who knows, even corporate shills who work for big corporations like Target might be asked to plop advertising links in the middle of their usenet posts or Slashdot discussions.
Advertisers will find a way, but it'll take more effort than they've given it so far.
John
John