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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."
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
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.
http://www.spareprojects.nl
Ads have their place. When I'm looking for a commercial alternative to something, the google list on the right is very useful.
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.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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!
In Canada, we don't fancy things like socks
As fonts get smaller, ASCII art in the adverts will pick up and pretty soon - we'll be back where we started.
Just a matter of time.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
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
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.'
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I'd say that text *articles* are doomed as well. How many people actually click the link and read everything?
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.
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.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
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 :)
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Text Ads have one other advantage over banners: You can't filter them out with software. (At least not now, or rather, not that I've seen.)
Blocking banners and pop-ups is pretty trivial, but blocking text ads? That seems to be a more difficult problem to solve.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
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.
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.
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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.
So anyhow, I remembered a text ad from Kuro5hin, from half a year ago. So I went over *to* kuro5hin, found the ad, clicked through, got an email address, and sent a specific question.
I don't know whether I'll buy from them: I give about a 5-10% chance of buying at all, even if the price is right. However, I can definitely say that text ads do work. Yeah, I'm blind to them, when I need to get stuff done. But for that same reason, I appreciate the consideration that is involved in a text ad, so when I have free time, I really do read them and remember them.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I remember reading one of the Dilbert books, Is your computer safe from hackers? where it said that marketing will continue to become more and more manipulative Make money with your website! as it builds upon the shoulders of already tried marketing schemes.
I just wonder how long before Specials on Ink Jet refill kits! they start putting ads Long Distance for just 1c per minute! in the middle Spy on your neighbors! of all web content?
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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.