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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.
In case anybody does not remember the X10 ads, I was able to find an online gallery of old X10 ads. Not at all subtle about who their target market is, are they?
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I see... so Google saved us all from ourselves did they? I seem to remember that even though Google was much talked about in 2000, it had yet to become the preminent search engine it is today.
Perhaps this has more to do with it: Results 1 - 10 of about 7,590,000 for Pop-up blocker software. (0.20 seconds). Taken from Google itself. Pop-ups weren't simply replaced, they were stamped out. They still exist, but not at the staggering, nauseating level they were once.
Does anyone know anyone who ever bought one of those X10 cameras?
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...but what a stretch. Even Hemos notes it:
I'd actually that while the text ads had something to do with it, the massive growth in pop-up/under blockers made a large difference as well.
( ignoring missing words and all. I have no room to talk in that dept )
Can we please attribute things to where they belong? google may be the second coming of Christ, who knows, but let's try to keep their achievements realistic.
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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.
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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.
Maybe for the big corporate sites. But massively invasive advertising is alive and well.
Turn off your pop-up blocker, turn on flash and check out PWInsider for a great example. If you have access to a Windows box check it out with IE, it's mind boggling...
Obviously, they are including tons of ads not for the purpose of gaining ad revenue as much as they are including tons of them to get people to buy a membership.
sig.
Let's not forget why text ads and pop-up blockers became popular in the first place... People demanded it! I don't know a single person that likes intrusive advertising like the pop-unders and the flash animations that come on top of everything else. What the google ads show is what everyone should have known before... The internet is a place where people come looking for you, and when that's the case, you don't need loud, fancy graphics, you only need enough information for them to identify your product (text).
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Maybe Google had some effect, but I think they were just part of the more general backlash against such ads.
Nobody but the parasuits liked them. Everyone savvy enough to know how to turn them off did so. I'd wager some people even quit web browsing over them.
Google didn't want them because 1) they slurp bandwidth and B) they can't be tracked for content and $) because they don't fit the Google "no evil" culture.
Those reasons pretty much coincide with how the rest of us saw them, too. Except for the pervs, that is. (Camera to spy on wife in shower? Ooh, baby!)
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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.
but i'm pretty that annoying ads, even tricky pop-under ones, never had the kind of click % that google ads to.
-- lol pwned
I wouldn't say internet ads have been tamed. Sure there are less popups and popunders. But whatabout all the new ones which cover the page (Fox is a major offender here), or noisy ads (I don't know if America got subjected to the jamster ads much).
This brings back some fond memories of a song that I once heard by Kompressor about the said X10 popups...
girl is naked, take a movie
girl is looking, picture cutie
you buy thing from pop up banner
you get wallet, purchase camera
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
window pop up on the screen
taking control of my machine
making all internet user insane
x10 profit goes down the drain
girl is naked, take a movie
girl is looking, picture cutie
you buy thing from pop up banner
you get wallet, purchase camera
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
the economy failing is x10 fault
popping up window is computer assault
window popup again and again
only solution is crush x10
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
we must destroy x10, we must destroy all internet ads
lately it's even worse than that. because of the situation you describe, i have been browsing with flash disabled for some time (easy to do in opera, though it takes all other plugins with it ;) ). and somewhat lately i see some nasty, annoying floating ads that are coded in javascript (i think. maybe java, but i don't think so).
for some reason that crap floats on top of the content, and doesn't go away. usually i just hit f12 and deselect java & javascript, then reload the page, i have considered disabling java[script] by default, but at least for javascript that would require pretty often pressing f12, so i leave it enabled for now.
Rich
Are there adverts on the internet then? WTF...
True enough though, for a while I couldn't be bothered to filter Google's ads. Nowadays I find RIP and CustomizeGoogle keep the interface nice and clean.
Useful links for those that like to make their own mind up:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
http://www.customizegoogle.com/
http://rip.mozdev.org/index.html
http://adblock.mozdev.org/
http://www.pierceive.com/
And for those that might bleat "without advertising, many sites would fail" I say Good. Let those sites fail. Give me micropayments and an honest relationship.
some of those have a skip link so you go to view the ad and then you click the skip link right away and you're at the store... i actually like those rather than news sites that don't allow you to view unless you either pay for a username or you have to sign up for a free username...
please me, have no regrets.
I got several of those cameras and was disappointed with the results. Apparently, bikini clad women were not lounging around my house when I was away at work. If they had been, I would have asked them to do a litle vacuuming.
Everyone who is using AdWords knows that Google introduced standard (graphical) banners in skyscraper format a while ago... The only reason why text ads became so popular is that AdSense was made available in a very simple way to many small web sites that would have a hard time finding paying advertisers otherwise (and of course Google's popularity helped too).
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Wwwyzzerdd. Three ws, two zs, and two ds.
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.
Google Ads made it possible to target advertising dollars in a way marketing managers could only dream of before. Text ads provide pinpoint market segmentation to advertisers, and was probably a strategic move do avoid higher bandwidth costs associated with Images. Once Google lights up their dark fibre, watch for an increase in Google Banners by companies looking for brand recognition rather than sales. Those like x10 (maybe your favorite VOIP company)who have no focus and listen to their ad agencies blow millions dollars by tossing stuff at people who are interested in their stuff.
Why? the Netscape browser was dying, IE Version whatever was the buggy, proprietary, virus-target of the day only other thing out there, and because MS is also in the advertising game via MSN, etc., they weren't about to give users the ability to turn off a specific class of advertisements without making it odious.
Then Firefox declares war via pop-up blocker, and within a short time the early adopters (who are really the most important predictor of future technological trends, methinks) were moving in droves away from IE, and I don't think I was more than a few days behind them.
Same time, Google's model saves me bandwidth and eye strain, and --ka- boom!!-- between the two the 'Net returned to being a useful tool with one tenth the amount of pain.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Another reason is Google ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site, it makes more sense to visitor to click on it. I do not think so before Google any one offered ads where any one could sign in to Adsense and earn money. So it is like small publisher grows with money and google makes more money.
But hold on Google Adsens offers Onsite Advertiser option too i.e. If some one likes your site they might able to advertises it via Google Adwords program. It is an extension of Google site targeting that makes it easier for advertisers to bid on *any* site.
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
There is no moral here, people go for what works. For the webmasters (hosting the ads), AdSense text ads means more money because these ads are targeted and received more clicks. They are also less annoying. For the advertisers, text ads means less money because these ads are targeted and received only valuable clicks. They are also quite well perceived. So I would say the decline of popups is not due to text ads but to *targeted* and *less* intrusive ads. BTW, popups (being for ads or not) are considered something bad (in terms of ergonomy).
Million Dollar Screenshot
Try the NoScript extension for Firefox. Gives you a context menu from an icon in the status bar, where you can flip scriting on -- permanently or temporarily -- for a particular web site.
Many sites have even more invasive ads now that everyone is using pop-up blockers. Things like the annoying paid links (double underlined) with huge tooltips inserted in the middle of articles, dhtml pop-overs, "infomercial" style text ads in the middle of articles.
There was some research done recently showing that the sheer number of (non-internet) adverts we see every day has just caused people to develop better ways of filtering them out.
These problems are solvable :)
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FasterFox, a network optimization extension for FireFox not only improves the performance of the browser but also helps block some ads. Its can block adds that use Macromedia popups which are designed to bypass standard pupup blockers.
Don't know if this stops X10's ads or not but you can try it.
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Their emphasis on the user was applied to ads as well. They recognized that text ads are less visually intrusive than image ads. So their refusal to allow banner ads in their results was great for users. But the real importance of this move was made important when advertisers began migrating to Google in droves. They discovered that text ads actually provide better long-term results than banner ads. Google forced advertisers to examine an approach web interface experts had been advocating for some time.
Yes, all this excitement about Google's role seems like deification, but Google really did change the landscape. They did it with a user-centered approach, which the prevailing players at the time simply did not have. Whether Google will continue to keep the interests of its users in mind is an open question, but their advertising model has radically altered the playing field in a good way.
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