Are Plain-Text Ads Doomed?

friedegg writes "Usability expert Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox examines the future of text advertising on the web. Text based advertising has become increasingly popular recently partly because of Google's success with it. Nielsen notes that advertising works well on search engines because users visit them with the specific intent of going elsewhere. He also thinks it's only a matter of time before the novelty of text advertising wears off, and users develop "box blindness" in addition to their current "banner blindness." It isn't totally negative, though, as he thinks the low-end media format forces advertises to express a focused and succinct message that users may take more seriously."

Comments

In a word: NO

[Blaine Hilton]

I do not see text ads as being "doomed". Like anything they have their place in the world. On WebCalc I sell text-based ads and the advertisers seem to like them. I like them because they look much better then banners and are faster to load. However when you look at them they do not grab your attention as much as the traditional graphic ads do. This sounds bad, but I think it is really a benefit because it provides you with a smaller quantity of visitors, but those visitors are of a higher level of quality.

Many times with newer rich media ads people are trying to close them when in reality they click through. This upsets the user who would probably close the site right away. Using such distracting ads such as rich media that goes over the whole site (think Yahoo and Weather.com) and pop-ups alienate your website visitors.

As for targeting, search engines are not the only application for targeting. All websites can implement targeting. If I have a site that's geared for collage students then the best ad would be for somebody targeting that demographic, it doesn't matter what form of advertising it is. This statement is very much like comparing apples and oranges.

Go calculate something

Re:In a word: NO

[DeltaSigma]

I have to agree with Blaine Hilton. In the last month I've clicked on far more text ads ( about a dozen ) than I have graphic ads ( about zero ). They simply tend to be more informative and more attention grabbing for me. And it's not as if this can merely be explained away by "graphic-blindness." No sir, as a fellow web designer I do have a tendancy to evaluate each and every new ad for its content, placement, relevancy to the subject at hand, and general appeal. Slashdot is a good example. I must see a few dozen VB.net or other Microsoft ads in the topics each day.

I've never clicked on a single one of them. And not because I hate Microsoft. Afterall, I am just as intrigued as many others about what ".net" really means. The problem is that every .net ad I've seen of theirs is uninformative, and I am given the impression that clicking on the ad will merely bring me to the same uninformative page I viewed the first time.

It seems the only reason microsoft uses these graphic ads as opposed to text ads is because they know they have the money to afford them.

Marketing preferences also likely have a lot to do with the entire issue. I can walk over to the graphics department right now and start a discussion about advertising methods and it will be a matter of minutes before I hear that wonderful phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words."

I won't argue that a picture isn't "worth a thousand words." I assure you it is. But in the case of advertising, those thousand words are completely generated by the potential customer viewing them.

I seem to recall this one .net add that was merely a laptop (apparantly powered off) sitting on a pine table in front of some glass windows which gave way to some rather nice tree scenery.

Now there's a thousand words that come to mind with this image but what purpose did this ad end up serving in my case? Well I'll have you know that after viewing that ad I had successfully equated .net to computers. That's right, I now know .net runs on a computer.

And this was on some RIAA article.

Now let's take a text ad I saw on the same page. "Register your copyrights easily." Before I even clicked I knew there was a company willing to register my copyrights with the United States government via the internet for a fraction of the cost via lawyer. I clicked it, I read the entire page, I bookmarked, I loved it. I will likely use these guys later due to their marketing decision. Oh sure, they could have put up some random stock photo with a fountain pen resting atop a rather intimidating form that said "Skip the lawyer, skip the hassle." But that just wouldn't be as effective.

It all comes down to the medium on which these companies have chosen to advertise. This is the internet, not television. One can direct me to a page that says "buy now buy now buy now." I'll merely go somewhere else. However, if you create a good product, and put your best effort forward to give as much detail as possible about the product, its uses, what standards it adheres to, etc. etc. then I promise you, as a potential customer, that I will evaluate your product and consider buying.

Information goes on the internet. Pretty pictures go on the television. Easy.

And there's no better time than now to be doing this (are you listning Microsoft, Intel, Amazon?). With most companies still in the "pretty pictures sell stuff" paradigm there is no better time to begin a campaign of traditional advertising in traditional media, and informative advertising on the internet.

So c'mon, get over the dot-com-bust already and start advertising on the web the way it was MEANT to be done. With genuine information about genuine products!

Better have them plaintext

[thespare]

It's way better to have afs plaintext. Personally, I never click on huge flickering banners. First of all because they are *so* annoying, and second because 9 out of 10 times; if you click 1, you'll get a thousand popups after that trying to have you visit Bukakke-specials or Preteen teens or whatever 31337 pr0n those stupid websites have.

Can't we just ban them? :-)

A.

The google ads are useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Ads have their place. When I'm looking for a commercial alternative to something, the google list on the right is very useful.

A trend...

[donjuanica]

Just like software "bloats" as CPU speeds increase, I think ads will "bloat" as users connection speeds increase. I think Mr Nielson is right - text ads are doomed.

My Experience

[waldoj]

On one of my websites, we switched to book-your-own text ads a few months ago. For the first month, the clickthru rates were astounding -- 5%-15% on some of them. Now, we're lucky to break 1%. The reason, of course, is obvious: they were new and interesting, and people noticed them because of that. Now, they are neither new nor interesting. They remain an amusing thing on the site, but they're not paying the bills, I'm afraid. All that we can do from here is continue to switch it up: move them around on the site, offer formats with bigger text, more words, etc. But that's not a solution, just a stall tactic.

-Waldo Jaquith

Plain text ads are better

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather have a plain text ad on the side that's actually relevant to what I'm looking for, compared to a flashing banner which puts me at risk of a seizure, or something that floats in and covers the article I'm trying to read (I end up just closing the page, screw it).

I've developed "Jakob Blindness"

[mblase]

With all due respect to his message of "Simplify, simplify", Nielsen is too passionate about his mission to be practical in applying it.

Just look at his site -- hasn't enjoyed any kind of redesign since he created it, or indeed any kind of design at all. There's nothing interesting on it, nothing inviting, nothing to indicate to someone that one thing is more important than another. In his vigor to keep his site accessible to text-only browsers he's completely ignored the visually unimpaired.

If his message today is that text-only ads will be ignored just as colorful graphical ones already are, then he himself should take this message to heart -- because text-only web sites are even easier to ignore.

Re:I've developed "Jakob Blindness"

[Hans Lehmann]

Just look at his site -- hasn't enjoyed any kind of redesign since he created it, or indeed any kind of design at all. There's nothing interesting on it, nothing inviting, nothing to indicate to someone that one thing is more important than another. In his vigor to keep his site accessible to text-only browsers he's completely ignored the visually unimpaired.

Exactly. His site is nothing but actual information, presented in an organized fashion with no clutter. He doesn't have Flash, animated GIFs, pop-ups, nothing. He probably didn't even hire a proper graphics design company to run it past a focus group before unleashing it upon the world.

I sure wish I had some mod points to give this a +1 funny, because you can't possibly be serious

Ads in General

[Luminous]

It is human nature to 'tune out' ads. They are so pervasive, it is the only way to accomplish anything. If I responded to every ad I see on a website, I wouldn't have time to actually do what I intended to do at the website.

With that element an accepted fact of advertising (people block out billboards, use TV commercials to grab something from the other room, flip channels on the radio when the 9 minutes of ads come on, and flip the ad pages in magazines to get to the content) advertisers still continue. Why? For that one or two people out of a thousand who respond to the ad.

I've done it. I see an interesting ad and I actually watch it. Or I see a banner ad for something unique and I click on it. Text ads are the same way, except I am more likley to read them (usually contain more information) and less likely to be annoyed by them (rarely flash, "vibrate", or make noise.)

Are they dying? No, they are settling.

*Advertising* is doomed

[wowbagger]

Advertising as it is praticed today is doomed.

It used to be that advertising was about making people aware of your product/service. Ideally, you did so the the most focused manner possible - if you were a lawn care service you went to people with lawns, etc.

You also did things like list yourself in the telephone book.

That form of advertising is useful to both the advertiser and the viewer, and so will persist. That is what getting your web site listed in Google under the appropriate indexes does.

However, now-a-days advertising is about "RAM THIS DOWN HIS THROAT AND MAKE HIM WANT IT NO MATTER WHAT!" I've heard it said that, to a marketer, it is a failure if you go into a store and buy only what you went in to buy.

That sort of advertising is doomed, because it a) does not generate good, high quality leads, and b) it pisses people off. That which pisses people off gets ignored.

Text ads work for some audiences

[MSBob]

I see text based ads as having a more "serious" audience. I would not advertise the latest server platform with a swoosh, bang flash movie. It calls for more maturity. A text ad is appropriate. Same if I advertise a whitepaper.

When it comes to selling the latest top 10 hit to a 15 year old however, that's a different story. A noisy flash ad may be just what's being called for.

Context is very important though. I don't want to be fed noisy, flashy ads when I'm reading technical articles... Actually I don't want to be fed noisy flashy ads at all, but I'm probably just an exception if the number of flash ads is anything to go by :)

People LIKE ads -- sometimes

[Alderete]

I think Nielsen's wrong here. I find that, for certain types of searches, I want to look at the ads. No, really! Here's an example. My wife and I have one of those WhirleyPop stovetop popcorn popping gizmos. It works reasonably well with regular popcorn and oil, but it's really, really spectacular if you get the pre-measured packets of popcorn, oil, and seasonings.

Right before last Thanksgiving, I went to Amazon.com and searched for WhirleyPop. I could buy more poppers, but not more supplies. So I went to Google. Google's search results (for "popcorn & WhirleyPop") were OK, but the ads were exactly what I was looking for -- vendors who could sell me something, fairly specialized, that's never available in any store I visit.

In this case, it was the ads, not the search results, that were interesting. All of those people were ready to sell me exactly what I wanted. Sometimes, ads are not ads, they are the results themselves.

Re:People LIKE ads -- sometimes

[gauauu]

Advertisers continue to advertise things that people know exist for one reason: Brand awareness.

Go to the store and buy toothpaste. Look at the brands. People tend to think of the ones that have been heavily advertised as the "high quality" brands. There are other non-generic brands that people think of as the "cheapo" brands, merely because they weren't heavily advertised.

Format doesn't matter, targetting does

[phorm]

Plain text banner-style ads might not do as well, especially long ones... but truly I appreciate them more than the annoying flash-type versions. Also, they show up much better than GIF's on links/lynx

An, as mentioned, effective short ads are very effective. For instance, when you're searching for "Digital Camera", and you get an immediate link on google to thinks like "prices on digital cameras on ebay/amazon" are still good forms of advertising. Not only are these ads short and sweet, but they're often actually relevant to what you're looking for, which flashy annoying banner-ads often are not.

I think it's not really a matter of getting ads that are flashy graphics or plain text-based, but more a matter of getting ads that are relevent (for graphic based, thinkgeek.com ads and many others on slashdot would be nicely targetted), In fact, when you think about it, there is a lot of advertising on slashdot, but most is relevant or from interested parties.

Box Blindness

[SpamJunkie]

He's wrong, and it's obvious why. "Box blindness" would be like "text blindness". It's too basic to easily tell it's an ad. Further inspection is required. Too many sites use shaded or bordered boxes as design elements for users to learn to ignore all of them.

Neilson should know this. For a user to learn to ignore something the majority of times they come across similar items they must be something that the user wants to ignore. With really wide animated graphics at the top of the page this is the case: most of them are something the user would prefer to ignore.

But there are too many "good" boxes on the internet for the user to learn this. Look at slashdot: there are boxes down each side. If one happened to be an ad that otherwise looked the same as the others users would have very little chance of ignoring it.

Re:Where advertising should really go

[Anonymous Coward]

that would be bad.... if an online magazine sells links within an article then how can that article be objective?? And any reviews/comparisons would be skewed. Banner ads are useless, who actually clicks on them? If anything is flashing at me or scrolling then it is annoying me. Google ads are the only ones I've ever clicked through because they are contextual, and are sometimes more useful than the search results. I was looking for oriental furniture and the ads that showed up on Google brought me to some cool sites.

Re:Where advertising should really go

[jo_ham]

This could be a bit of a problem. I for one would be very dubious about clicking on a link like that.

It could be genuine, or it could be a hijacked page - remember Microsoft's "smart links" feature that would take keywords in your pages and make them into hyperlinks to sites it thinks you should visit?

It just seems a bit dodgy.

Not convinced...

[NanoGator]

Slashdot's been running text-based ads in the banner space above, and I can honestly say I've actually read those. Click-through is another story all together, but the message got through. The graphic banners are usually lost on me, mainly because they don't actually provide information.

It's kind of like the difference between reading Nickel Ads (or the want-ads in a newspaper) and reading a billboard. Me personally, I like having all the info up-front before I click. I'm sorry they can't track that, but banners have suckered me too many times. Just yesterday I clicked on a banner that said "Revolution OS" with a picture of a CD on it. When I got there, it turned out to be a documentary about this OS. I was expecting a distro I could install. Grr.

Here's what I think makes the text-ads work on Slashdot:

1.) They share the same font style/size as Slashdot.

2.) All the info's there. For example, I ran across the ad for adding barcode support to apps, with free demos available. I didn't click it (I have no use for barcodes) but if I did, I'd feel comfortable knowing where I'm going.

3.) They don't annoy me. They don't try to grab my attention. They don't pop up new windows. They don't interrupt my reading. Etc.

4.) They're relatively on-topic. Though I have no use for barcodes, it is of a subject matter that would be discussed here.

I just hope that the good stuff here isn't borrowed and 'improved' until they have to find some other way to sneak ads into content.

Why google works

[Anonymous Coward]

I often times go to google with some vague idea of the brand names and models of what I want to buy. By searching google, I not only get relevant advertiser links that I usually click on, but I also get all the reviews, etc with it. I wouldn't click on the ads if they were banners because banners convey less meaningful information that text ads. The text ad gives me a contextual description of what I'm looking for, whereas banner ads just flash different pictures and I have to sit there and wait for it to cycle through them all before I can make a judgement of whether I want to click it or not.

In short, text ads = good because all the information is right there. banners ads = bad because I have to sit and watch them to get all the relevant information.

Complex Ads still prosper

[pfankus]

I've noticed even more invasive ads, more so than pop-unders or pop-ups (see this google article for their take on it). Coming to the mainstream it seems that flash ads that popup over the page itself and make some noise are becoming quite popular, and I've decided to completely stop visiting these sites, weather.com being one of them. (I think they're running an ad right now where a rhino busts through your page...wahoo.) Thankfully, the National Weather Service is ad-free! These ads are not only annoying, but make it difficult to close and take too much time when all you want is real content.

This article on Low-End Media for User Empowerment explains why simple adverstising works, and why complex doesn't.

Text based ads vs banners

[Musashi Miyamoto]

Text based ads as they are presented on Google will not go away. There are major differences between the way Google uses text based ads and the banners found on most other web sites:

- The ads on Google are almost always related to the search that the user is performing. The ads almost augment the search results with semi-relevant information.
- Banner ads on most other websites (cough.. slashdot!.. cough) are unrelated to the topic of the web page, and sometimes to the subject matter of the website itself.
- As the article stated, the user is already expecting to be moving onward to another web page, so feels free to click on an ad.

These are major differences that have nothing to do with the fact that one is text and another is a banner. If google wanted to display banner or graphical ads instead of text boxes in the same way, the clickthrough rate would probably be similar or better.

I dont care about an "Anime Unleashed" advertisement when I am posting a message about banner ads. If Slashdot tied the topics of the articles to the banners that they present, they might bet better clickthrough rates...

Not dead, but not the "next big thing" either...

[Kjella]

It's the usual pendulum, just like it is with womens skirts, sometimes they go up, sometimes down, but every year there's something "new". Same with ads. First ads were "average", then they got more and more instrusive. Then came the rebound and there were friendly, non-obtrusive ads. When that fad is over, there'll be something new.

But if you want me to read ads, stick with text-based. Privoxy/Opera seems to stop the rest. And if you complain about me not giving enough ad revenue, some beats nothing. And no, I will never ever allow sites to pop up windows and run annoying blinking banners again, if I can help it. I'm just waiting for the first blink tag text ad to show up....

Kjella

Relevance!

[fireshipjohn]

There, thats the secret,

If I go to a search engine, and theres a relevant ad I will welcome it...

If they are trying to sell me a (insert useless item) or credit card... I DO NOT..

Its a simple concept, why can advertisers not grasp it??

It's not that banner ads are annoying...

[Violet Null]

It's that they're often just not very informative. Too many banner ads seem to have been designed by marketers under the premise that if they get a mysterious hook set up, people will follow their ad to learn more. But that's not the way people work, either on-line or off.

Consider a TV commercial that showed, say, a cannon firing hamsters at the letters "outpost.com", with no explanation of who or what outpost.com actually was. The thing would fail, and fail miserably (and, in fact, has). But advertisers seem fixated that the same setup will work on the web, for some reason. At least 90% of the banner ads I see are setup like a hook (such as, "Looking for a new job?") rather than giving info (such as "Monster.com: Over three bazillion ad postings")

If more banner ads were informative -- giving me info on who the ad was for, where it would take me, and why I should be interested -- I bet they'd have a higher clickthrough rate. That's what Google's ads do. It's got nothing to do with whether the ad is graphical or not...until the ads start getting intrusive, at which point people are actively suppressing them.