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Ask Jeeves Gives Up On Banner Ads
WhatBusinessModel? writes "In another blow to online banner advertising, Ask Jeeves is announcing that it will stop running banner ads on its website in favor of more paid listings. Says Steve Berkowitz, president of Ask Jeeves Web Properties, 'I think banners have seen their day. They're not as compelling as they once were.' In contrast, he describes paid listings as 'kind of a next evolution of the yellow pages.'" Probably a change that will become more and more prominent in the search engine world.
Jeeves is a character from a series of extremely fun P.G. Wodehouse books (example) who continually makes up for his master's bumblings in upper-class England.
So when I hear "Ask Jeeves is eschewing banners for paid listings" I cynically suspect they left out "and a heaping crapload of pop-ups."
No, they already got rid of those. Check out the second sentence of the article:
The decision follows the company's move last fall to halt pop-up ads, which other Web sites such as iVillage and America Online have also done.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
Ask Jeeves is several years older than Google.
They started off well, but very quickly, they decided to be more of a "yellow page" site accepting money for listings.
Google *won* the search engines wars the old fashioned way... they made a better product, they mark what's commercial, and they do a better job.
Let me repeat that for morons like you:
"THEY DO A BETTER JOB".
You're f'ing welcome.
I used to find Ask Jeeves very helpful. I was often able to get at questions for which other search engines gave me too many answers. I've used it less and less as they've put in more and more sponsored links. I suspect that I'll never use it now.
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
Having interned at a media buying company whose clients often advertised on a wide variety of search engines (this was about two years ago, before Google had really started to dominate) I'm a little confused. Your comment seems very well thought out and reasonable, but in my experience it also seems a lot like how things are already done, at least in the case of the search engines I worked with.
Click-thru rate is astonishingly small--something like one in a thousand. So the buyer pays for impressions first and foremost, so many dollars (or cents) for so many thousands of times the ad is seen. Click-thrus are also kept track of and earn a higher rate and a cookie is set to keep track of whether the viewer actually buys a product from the web site. If there is a click-thru purchase, the web site gets paid much more for that than an individual impression, of course. The cookie also works so that the buyer can look at the banner ad but not click on it--if he just sees the ad and ends up placing an order a week later without having ever clicked on it the search engine still gets paid for it, though usually not as much as a straight click-thru purchase.
So impressions, click-thrus, and purchases are kept track of and charged accorindingly. In fact, during my high school internship my job was to format the reports of number of views, clicks, purchases, et al. for the client. As far as I know, the impression-based advertising model is in place online on most search engines, and has been for a while.
"Someone somewhere had to wear pants for the first time. The meek and indecisive do not change our world." -Montville
But you fail to realize that the majority of ad-related decision makers are marketing people, who are inherently evil and stupid (I know, my boss is one).
My boss, for instance, is annoyed that we don't constantly have a popup on our site. Myself and the editor have resisted constantly, but eventually we're either going to have to come up with a better idea or give in. The problem with our ideas is that they aren't intrusive. Why do they need to be intrusive?
Well, we need to make money even though we're just the web site for a larger company that makes tons of money. Right now the site costs about $400,000/year to run and brings in about $350,000 almost entirely through advertising. Somehow we have to get advertisers to cough up at least $50,000 more per year and advertisers wan't views and clicks.
Unfortunately, the web makes it very easy to track exactly which response viewers have to ads, so the ads are held accountable for what kind of response they get. TV, on the other hand, has no reliable form of accountability for ad productiveness, so advertisers rely on incorrect aggregate data from Neilson (or another company) to determine how successful their ad is.
Making money on the web is tough.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.