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How Text Ads Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web
securitas writes "In Sunday's New York Times, Randall Stross writes about How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web and how it is largely responsible for the demise of the odious pop-under ad. From the article: "Without intending to do so, the company set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only, please. No banner ads, no images, no animation.... Google introduced these ads at the very moment when X10 ads were strewn like chewed gum on every square of sidewalk. X10's pop-unders were accepted at mainstream sites run by companies including Microsoft, Yahoo and The New York Times." Remember that "in mid-2001, X10's company Web site was the fourth-most visited" on the Web. Thank you, Google." I'd actually argue that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made as much of a difference, if not even more.
Lately thanks to animation-plugins and other technologies, I've seen a rash of annoying pop-up and "peel-back" ads. Anything that covers existing content without me explicly asking it to do so is by definition annoying.
I'm waiting for someone who has the skill to update Firefox so plugins cannot overwrite areas of the screen already used by text and graphics. Either that or put in white space for the part of the screen the ad will eventually take over, so the ad doesn't obscure the real content.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Interestingly, if you're an Adsense publisher nowadays there's a lot more options for banners and graphical ads for what used to be a text only scheme. The banners seem to get a reasonable CTR too.
I think what killed the old style banner ad was not so much text ads, but the fact that the Google text ads were well targeted compared to the moronic "hit the monkey!!" banner ads. I know many ad publishers also became annoyed at the banner ads which seem specifically designed to get a low click-through rate, thereby getting maximum branding exposure for the advertiser at minimum cost. I reckon any ad publisher is forever grateful to Google for revolutionising this system.
Definitely. Pop-ups and po-unders are annoying, but stoppable.
However, something which is much more annoying are those banner ads that use flash to make the ad creep out of the 400x80 banner and fill the whole browser window with a large animation for 10 seconds.
I remember in the early days of the bot com boom I worked at a startup where we would host websites for free in exchange for the right to add unobtrusive text advertisements. Strangly while many people were interested in having us host their sites, NO advertisers would make a deal with us. They insisted on banner or popup ads only.
However, I did let them know that their ads tend to be very obnoxious and intrusive and they almost lost me as a potential customer because of it (they asked how I'd heard of X10-- who hasn't heard of X10 that's used a web browser??!). It's a shame when good companies alienate potential customers in that way. And it wasn't even one of their ads that got me, anyway. It was PriceGrabber or MSN Shopping or something like that. They happened to have the best price. My purchase was actually in spite of their ads, not because of them.
Hmm.... that does make me wonder.
Google sells non-popup ads, and provides users with a blocker for popup ads. Personally, I can understand the valid, intelligent reasons for doing both - both giving consumers what they want.... but put together, it looks pretty damn evil.
Actually, you don't really have to care.
You're in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation with everyone else visiting those sites. You may choose to block, or not to block.
If you block, and everyone else blocks, you don't get bothered by ads, and the site soon fails. Bad.
If you don't block, and everyone else blocks, you get bothered by ads, and the site STILL fails. Awful.
If you don't block, and nobody else blocks, you get bothered by ads, and the site survives. Good.
If you block, and nobody else blocks, you don't get bothered by ads, and the site survives. Great!
Now, since Everyone Else will make their own choices, and you cannot significantly influence them in that choice, you might as well please yourself. You may therefore block ads with a clear conscience.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Very true, but Google had a hand in that, as well. The Google toolbar, with popup blocking, was popular before browsers like Firefox that have integrated popup blocking were part of the mainstream.
Google's toolbar rose at the same time as Firefox did (along with a lot of other third party toolbars. Lots of pop-up blocking toolbars preceded Google in the IE space, for instance): Google doesn't need to be thanked for implementing something so obvious, and they were far from first.
Of course for the people in the know, before the browser clients started implementing this functionality it was the norm to use local proxies that blocked popups, unwanted scripts and cookies, etc. I can't even remember the name of it now, but I used one for about a year.
This is all so ridiculous anyways - for people who haven't noticed, Google has already "evolved" from text ads, to full-graphic banners. It's only a matter of time before they're animated (they probably already are), and who knows from there. Google's ascent was largely to the connected geek crowd, and they differentiated themselves from Excite! and Yahoo by having a tremendously lightweight interface - that's what got them attention. Slowly they introduced text ads, and as we've seen they've grown from there. There is nothing special or benevolent about Google's technique: It was simply their way of getting where they are, and it worked beautifully.