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

Why shouldn't they work?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Plain text advertising works in print media so why shouldn't it work online too?

I don't need to see a picture of a memory module to be interested in an add offering to sell me 512MB RAM at a good price.

Remember, content is king.

Spymac

[kaamos]

Spymac --> http://www.spymac.com

had a pretty innovative ad for a week there. It showed something to the extent of :"No Ad here for a week, brought to you from MSN of Os X" and then dissapeared after 3-4 seconds, leaving you without flashing lights or anyway, which made the surfing quite enjoyable.

If you missed what the ad said you could hover on it and it gave you a hands-on on what MSN is and blah blah... I have to admit that was a slick ad!

Next generation ads (IMHO)

[FortKnox]

The next generation ads will be much more intrusive, but much less annoying. A good example is going to McDonald's in the game "The Sims".

Ads will start getting integrated right into what you are doing (especially games). This isn't, necessarily, a bad thing. It'll help keep the consumer costs down for the product, and aren't as annoying and attention-stealing as popups or banners.

Would this be considered a text ad? I'd say so, unless you want to classify it into a new class, like 'integrated ad.'

Re:My Experience

[Anonymous Canard]

Advertising is an offer to redirect the user into a new information stream.

Paradoxically, the better the data on a site is organized the less likely a user is to want to break out of the information flow they are in. But decreasing the quality of information only has the effect of making it less valuable to visit that site in the first place.

Arguably, to be effective advertising should be located near where the user makes information flow decisions, and the information flow decisions cannot be so consistent that the user learns to ignore any alternatives that are presented. For a Blog style site like your nancies page, that would mean interspersing advertising into the news stream as articles. You don't want to confuse readers, so the advertising should be in offset type and layout (mp3.com does a good job of this), but the position of advertising within the news list should be altered from day to day.

While we are on the subject though, I should probably mention a pet peeve that I have with online advertising. Just because you can change which advert is delivered with each page doesn't mean that you should. Varying the content from user to user is fine, but having seen the page with a specific layout once, the advertising should be left the same the next time that I view that page. Swapping out ads messes up my information flow; I have to backtrack to see if I missed something that I really wanted to read, and I may have lost a link to an ad that I really wanted to follow later in my browsing.