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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 now instead of annoying consumers, let's just restrict what we show them. Is that the jist of it?
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
...is because pop-ups are more visible (read as: annoying) and they don't mess up the site's page layout.
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."
It's all a moot point, though, because who in their right mind uses Ask Jeeves in the first place?
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
I don't have a problem with paid listings, as long as they don't mess with the search order based on how much the companies pay. The Yellow Pages don't put the highest paying customers all in the front of the book with no regard to what you're looking for.
Let them have a nice little relevant ad in the search results, but keep the search results in proper order.
rarr rarr rarr ask jeeves sucks rarr rarr rarr use google rarr rarr rarr
But what happens when Google has a monopoly?
I believe popup-banners and all the pop-unders etc.. have played a large part in poluting the internet AD industry, and made most all of us bitter and ad-unfriendly.
At one time banner ads thrived, you could sell them on a popular site and make thousands, or you could spend a little and get a lot elsewhere.
Now in 2003, banner ads are looked down at. Most of us either ignore the ads and don't even pay attention to them, or we block them with certain tools.
TextAds are not to shabby tho, providing basic detail in a non-pictorial format just to let us know what it is and a link to learn more about it.
Google, by providing Textads and not huge 468x60 banners, has kept their site clean and no cluttered.
Sites like Slashdot, Yahoo, and many more are slowly realizing banners are not producing enough UNF to pay the bills, and are resorting to subscriber based services like Yahoo Personals, or Slashdot's subscriptions.
Another prime example would be Salon.com.
The dotcom boom is long over, and will never be the same again... Look at how we view TV commercials!
Companies spend TONS of money on magazine ads, billboards, newspaper ads..etc. And you can't track how many views or sales leads they generate the way you can on the web.
I bet those billboards and newspaper ads create less web page views than web banners.
Yet companies still spend money on those types of advertising.. Why? Because advertising is all about familiarity. Getting the name and image out and making it stick in people's heads. Banners are an effective way of doing that.
Nobody expects someone to read a newspaper ad and run to the store to buy something, so why do people expect that kind of behaviour on the web??
Banner ads can be compelling if they are:
1) Non intrusive or tricky (unlike Presion Time Ads)
2) Very well targeted.
For example, if I'm surfing a music band's website, and there is a banner for online music retailer, that will take me directly to a list that band's albums, that's a good banner. Even if I don't click on it, I will not whine about it beign there. This is probably a very clear cut case, but there are many where banner ads can be compelling and complementary to the website's content. Unfortunatly, less 1% are well thought probably, and since very few people click on them, they are not compeling (monetary wise) to website operators.
Of course, as with mostly everything in the Internet, it is easier to mass abuse rather than be creative, thoughtfull, or decent.
please excuse my apathy
to use your enemy's own money and resources against them when your own resources are considerably less.
It's an Aikido thing.
KFG
Not to sound harsh, but I think you're missing the point. The OP is saying that more and more "high-profile" sites (not sure if ask.com is considered "high-profile") are throwing out the banner-ad revenue model.
More of a comment on the state of web trends than a breaking news alert about ask.com per se.
"First you gotta do the truffle shuffle."
Sure, it's certainly nothing compared to google, but if you're asking a common question it serves up the answer much faster than google will. Also, google's great for techies like us, but some people can be confused by the way it just rattles off a bunch of sites and it's easier for them to just get an answer strait from Jeeves. Jeeves also gives you a list of other related searches on the right-hand side of the screen that I find very usefull when I'm trying to get just the right word combination in order to get some good results.
that kind of behaviour on the web??"
Beats the hell out of me. From my perspective the "failure" of banner ads has come from the advertisers themselves not having a very clear idea of their own business. This is less uncommon than many people think.
For a perspective on this read "Ogilvy on Advertising." Why this book isn't on every executive's desk is beyond me.
Most companies don't have a clear idea on the difference between advertising and promotion either. I recall seeing an interview with A-B's NASCAR rep. He explicitly stated that the 50 million or so they spend in Budweiser sponsorship, so far as they knew, didn't result in one *single* can of beer being sold, and that they didn't care. That wasn't what they were spending that money for in the first place.
Please note that Budweiser is the number one selling beer in America by a goodly margin. These people have taken a ride on the clue train. Why others don't observe and learn is a wonder and a mystery.
Porsche sold every 959 at a loss. Estimates of how *much* of a loss range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands . . . *per unit.* No one but Porsche knows for sure.
Decades later Porsche still considers this some of the best money they've ever spent. Hmmmmmmmm, maybe another clue?
Banner ads work. It isn't the fault of the *ads* if the *advertisers* don't understand the definition of "works."
KFG
I've often wondered why companies and websites have insisted on using _banner_ ads as their preferred medium of profiling a product. It seems that everyone can spot such an advertisement a mile off. A much more subtle "trick" is to use advertise in a simple text link. That way the user has a harder time differentiating the commercialised crap and actual content. Oh well, I suppose I should be grateful. On another note, I like how Google clearly marks their text ads with a yellowish frame.
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
Over time that will change. As content ownership consolidates, these companies will be loathe to subsidize Google's ad business by providing them with free content. Look at Google News. Really, how long can they expect their crawler to be allowed to copy content? In this sense all Google is doing is stealing content someone somewhere paid for, Reuters feeds aren't free folks. For now thats fine, the stakes are low. As soon as Google News actually competes as a news site, their crawler won't be allowed in.
I would not be surprised to see major content owners to charge access to crawlers in the future. Why not? If users are charged, so should crawlers. In fact the crawler should be charged more, as they are basically getting a copy to redistribute it to many users, not just to be viewed by one.
In the next few years, as ownership and access to content become critical issues for the bottom line, Google may find itself facing a toll both instead of a robots.txt file.
There's a problem with that, though (at least as far as I can tell). The banner ads at Slashdot, for example, are from images.slashdot.org. If I block those, I lose all of the icons on the page, which I don't want to do. Mozilla needs a finer-grained image filter, based on the image name and/or path (e.g., block stuff with "banner" or "ad" in the path).
Junkbuster does this by default, but Mozilla and Junkbuster don't seem to get along very well. At least, they didn't before, and I haven't tried recently.
-Chris
Banner ads are still done wrong on a lot of sites. The problem is they are too often arranged to be paid based on the number of times clicked, and ignore payment based on impression. Impression is how ads work in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. But on the web, many advertisers saw the possibility of interactive clicking and just assumed a consumer would click on the ad whenever they wanted to find out more. Just notice how many ads don't really tell you in the ad what company or even what product/service is involved.
Unlike most of the other media, web users often tend to be motivated for other goals at the moment the ad is impressed. For example when visiting a portal like Ask Jeeves, they have something on their mind they are looking for. The ad is just a diversion and they are unlikely to go there.
But ... ad impressions still work. They just have a latent psychological effect that builds up over time. Seeing the ad once, if its something you are really interested in, might get you over to that site ... later on today. Or it might even get you to buy that product ... later on this week. And if it's something you have no interest in at all, when you see that ad (best if it's not intrusive which would make it negative) many many times, you build up "brand awareness". Later, maybe many months later, when you do have a need for that product or service, or happen to be talking with someone who does, then the brand name comes up. When shopping for that kind of product and you see several choices on the store shelves, you're more inclined to pick the brand that was more advertised just because it now seems to be the more familiar brand ... and you never even visited their web site.
If you like fast food and McDonalds adds a new product to their lineup which you might like, the banner ad for it might clue you in to this wonderful new treat. But are you likely to visit their web site? A few people might. Most won't. Are you likely to pull in the next time you're driving down the street while hungry on your lunch break? Very likely.
Too many web site operators think they have to be paid for advertising based on click throughs. That's just wrong, and it needs to change for web advertising to survive (the interactivity goals based on ads was never a realistic concept).
Too many businesses in product areas, especially consumer, where there is no real value of a web site to their product (fast food, small appliances, groceries, clothing, etc) are just not advertising on the web at all because they know people won't click on the ads to visit their site (no obvious value to it). What they are missing is that the impression model still works ... or that they are afraid of advertising based on impressions because of some difficulties in accounting and auditing (mostly because its still too click-through oriented and these problems are not yet well solved).
Impression ads, of course, have to be cheaper per impression than a click-through. And this won't rule out still having click-through ads. While writing this comment the Think Geek ad for Bawls is blinking away at me. I'm not going to be visiting because I have no interest today. But if next month I happen to have an interest in it, I know where to go get it. That's latent response impression advertising. But it only works when the ad makes it clear where to go (domain names help if it's an online place to go). And it only works if the web site is going to get paid even if no one ever clicks on the ad.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As content ownership consolidates, these companies will be loathe to subsidize Google's ad business by providing them with free content
But hang on, Google News only takes the headline and first paragraph -- it doesn't copy entire stories. And the main web index already allows you to specifically exclude your pages from Google's cache if that's what you'd prefer.
However, by allowing Google to spider your site and exerpt a paragraph or two the result is a three-way value exchange:
1. Google gets to build a great index that it can leverage to generate revenue
2. The publishers get extra traffic through the Google index and they can leverage that to generate revenue.
3. The average Net user gets a nicely organized index to help them track down the latest news or information.
So long as this balance remains, everybody wins.
When I started out in the online News aggregation business five years ago I encountered some resistance from a few news sites (such as Nando.net) that actually wanted to charge me for carrying their headlines and providing links to their stories.
Just 18 months later (when my aggregation network was being accessed over a million times a day), many of those same news sites were begging to be included in the index because they wanted the traffic.
Any content provider that tries to charge Google (or any other index) for spidering/linking rights will be attempting to unbalance the value-exchange and they'll ultimately fail.
Just look at the Google model -- one of the main reasons that it is at the top of the pile is because it continues to offer a good value exchange to visitors.
Unlike many of its peers, Google doesn't assault you with endless banners and pop-ups or insult you with paid listing that are made to look like genuine search results. As a user, I get good value out of Google so I keep going back.
If someone chooses not to be included in Google's index because they demand payment then it's their loss, not mine (nor Google's).