Report on Last Decade of Online Advertising

Eh-Wire writes "Doubleclick.com has an interesting 24 page PDF available covering the history of online advertising over the last decade. Interesting trivia include recounts of some of the first online ads presented on HotWired. Online advertising has become very competitive in the last ten years and last year saw a revival of activity in this form of advertising. The usual selection of graphs and charts are there to pretty up the document. Overall an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing."

Comments

I will sum up the last 10 years of ads in 2 words

[FidelCatsro]

Increasingly annoying.

Smart or Dumb...

[DaHat]

I can't decide if the poster of this story is a genius... or an idiot.

Traditionally posting a direct link to a 1 meg file on the front page of /. is dumb... but at the same time... DoubleClick is not a very popular company when it comes to the ads they sell or those like them... so such a /.ing can only hurt those most /.ers dislike... hum

Its really difficult these days

[Saven Marek]

As an advertiser not to get lumped in with the same bucket as people who spam outright or spread malware and scam people. I am employed by a bulk email marketing business used by several medical companies and more often than not our services are presumed to be spam and blocked by users.

This is unfortunate as I see it, as it was easier in the earlier days before spammers took over the internet and all forms of advertising were acceptable and just known as part of the internet. I dont think the tools to block adverts are doing good either. sometime somewhere someone has to pay for the sites you visit. Not accepting their advertising banners and emails is a form of rippinbg people off I thnk.

Re:Its really difficult these days

[DrJonesAC2]

You must be new here.

Re:Its really difficult these days

[kz45]

This is unfortunate as I see it, as it was easier in the earlier days before spammers took over the internet and all forms of advertising were acceptable and just known as part of the internet. I dont think the tools to block adverts are doing good either. sometime somewhere someone has to pay for the sites you visit. Not accepting their advertising banners and emails is a form of ripping people off I thnk.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's ripping people off.

All large scale sites (including slashdot) need some form of advertising or revenue stream. If these ads are blocked continuously and the revenue isn't there, sites will go away or will be forced to charge money.

I would rather have free sites with advertisements than for-pay sites.

Re:Its really difficult these days

[eddy the lip]

I'm not anti-advertising by any means, and I'd like to jump in here before the hordes rip you a new one.

I'm assuming that you have an opt-in only list, with addresses collected from people that knew exactly what they were opting in to? Otherwise it's unsolicited, and it's spam. Full stop. I don't htink there's anything wrong with opt-in lists, but if I get email I'm not expecting from someone selling something, I'm going to be right pissed. There's no way you can tell me that ditching email I receive without reading it is stealing; certainly no more than tossing the grocery store flyers I get in the recycling.

As for online advertising, there's a fine line. I don't generally block ads, because I do like to support the sites that I read. Content and bandwidth don't come free, and I'm more than happy to see an ad or two to support it. Slashdot and Boing Boing are two good examples of doing this right.

However, if you intentionally abuse my goodwill and make your site hard to use by flashy, blink, whizzy, poppy things, yes, I'm going to block them. I don't think there's anything wrong with enhancing the usability of what is a poorly designed site.

The real problem right now is greedy, clueless advertisers that are driving people to use adblockers. They're busily destroying any future market for themselves. It's the kind of short sighted business tactics we're getting all too used to seeing. "Leave a little salt for the bread" and all that.

I can't tell from your post, but I have to say it sounds an awful lot like you should be lumped in with these people. Maybe I'm wrong, but you really should be donning that asbestos underwear about now.

(Spyware and malware are a whole other evil kettle, I agree. You are 100% wrong, though, that advertising has always been an accepted part of the internet. Maybe if you came on after the Endless September, but before that it was seriously frowned on.)

Re:I Wonder

[NetNifty]

Why would they waste time trying to advertise to people who have made it perfectly clear that we don't want annoying intrusive advertising thrust upon us. The best thing they could do imo for all parties concerned is use plain text ads, they aren't intrusive enough to annoy hardly anyone and therefore probably won't be blocked.

Content on Doubleclick?

[Experiment 626]

Not that people RTFA on a normal article, but in this case any geek worth his salt will have Doubleclick blocked in their /etc/hosts, router tables, Adblock filters, or what have you and in the case of the tinfoil hat types, all of the above just to be sure. I really don't think it's worth turning my filters off just to hear Doubleclick spin the history of online advertising to make themselves sound good.

Re:Shock and awe

[MmmmAqua]

Nobody at Doubleclick will understand your (justified) incredulity unless you call it "flashvertising". Duh, get with the times...

;)

So the history of advertising is only doubleclick?

[mcguyver]

This article fails to mention any company other than Doubleclick as being involved in online advertising. It's naive to think that any 10 page marketing document produce by Doubleclick would be about anything other than Doubleclick however the title of this article is the history of online advertising over the last decade. Give any college student a day and they surely could come up with something far superior to this narcissistic press release.

Can it last?

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has worked for several major media companies I am truly worried whether the current online ad boom (beyond dot-com peaks as the Doubleclick PDF shows) can continue.

A great number of the ads sold these days are text ads, with Google the biggest seller. These ads are great because they are far less obtrusive for the user and the advertiser only pays per click. Many advertisers have been very happy with them, including lots of small businesses in once-small niches who have found loads more customers.

But as we've seen in the last few months text ads can be gamed. Your competitor might set up a botnet to "click" your ad, stealing dollars from you, and you might never know. Or the same competitor can hire real live humans from impovrished countries to do the same thing.

Also, even mighty Google has not been able to effectively stop link spam and SEO manipulation of the "regular" search results. Will people really keep advertising when they can be in the main search results section for possibly less money?

Then there are the ad blockers you Slashdotters are so fond of. Not only do they screen big banner ads, many of them screen out text ads as well. This is a niche technology but then so was pop-up blocking a year or two ago, now it is being built into IE. As Firefox gains traction I expect ad blocking to increase.

Then you've got the user registration schemes and technical route-arounds like bugmenot.com. The whole point of online advertising is being able to target certain customers, but users are sick of filling out registration forms and leery of being tracked in any way so we're seeing more technical tools to defeat the raison d'etre of online ads, targeting.

These are not truths anyone can get paid or respected for saying right now, so no one is saying them. But that does not make them any less valid. Online advertising is probably here to stay but there are a lot of kinks to work out before it becomes more troublesome and expensive for businesses or users to game the system than to accept the ads.

Re:One would *think*

[MynockGuano]

With ten years of empirical research they'd *know* what motivates people to purchase. sigh.

Apparently, they think they do. From TFA:

The many forms of marketing and advertising it enables---permission email, keyword-targeted search engine advertising, floating animated page takeovers, interactive onpage rich media ads, streaming audio and video, consumer-fueled "viral marketing," to name a few--have excited early adopters and now mainstream marketers in ways that traditional advertising has not seen the likes of since the early days of color television.

"Viral Marketing" -- WOW!
"Interactive on-page rich media ads" -- SWEET!
"Floating animated page takeovers" -- SIGN ME UP!

It almost sounds as if they're proud of these things.

Self advertising != fact

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Why read what is obviously going to be a very biased bunch of bullshit. I can paraphrase without even RTFA:

Online advertising works. It is highly effective and low-cost. This is the only way to sell your product to millions of people.

People love to get up to date information on your products so that they can buy them.

Double click are the people to deal with. We already have a great relationship with web surfers and we're the only way to go.

Re:The last three years have been ad free...

[88NoSoup4U88]

I've been using the standard Firefox install, and never suffer from any popups/popunders, or any other annoying ads.

And no, I don't mind ads such as Google's, or ordinary image-ads, as I know that most sites can stay online, because of them.

Re:Grown Men Cry

[Anonymous Coward]

I was working at Doubleclick on 9/11. There was a panic as everyone was frantically trying to deactivate all of the airline advertisements.