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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.
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.
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.