Adfully Awful – the humanly inexplicable horrible state of the online advertising world today.
Today’s topic of discussion is a long time coming. I have been thinking a lot about the state of online advertising and particularly how bad it is. What is even more disturbing is how not much has change since the early days of the Internet. Although, there are glimpses of hope on the horizon and the future looks promising.
Right now the advertising dollars are divided in to two major categories: search and display advertising. Google rules the first of the two and it does so without much competition. A press release from eMarketer on the outlook for 2011 gives the search giant a whooping 75.9% market share or almost $11 billion in revenue. The rest of the pie is dived by Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL for grand total of 93.6%. It all looks understandable and my major issue is not really with search advertising. Now do not get me wrong. There are major issues in this type of advertising but at least the major players are trying their hardest to make it better, relevant and usable.
The second category, display advertising, is where the adfully awful title comes from. Raise your hand if in the last 24 hours you have searched for information only to be taken to a crudely put hack job of a website, whose one and only purpose is to display ads. (Now put down your hand). It is quite irritable to put it mildly. I have to admit that search engines are trying really hard to clean up their queries but as with all things profitable, “people” will always find a way to circumnavigate the system and score a dollar or two in the process. Instead of tweaking your search algorithms 500 times a year why don’t you try harder to limit the advertising dispensary of dollar bills to questionable individuals with at best low moral boundaries. Yes, yes I know the magic word profit. It is not enough to be profitable but you have to be above “street expectations” this quarter. I just wonder if all of this is part of my Inability to Change post from yesterday. At least I see some inkling of a “want to change” attitude.
There is even one worse category of display advertising providers. It is the hundreds and thousands of websites that have turned their sites in to advertising mind field. Fields in which even if you try hard to evade them, you are going to “step” on an ad or two. These are the websites that irk me the most. Do you really need 20 advertising spots on a single page? How good of a business model and strategy is it really in the long run? If I am reading an article on a newspaper’s site about the occupy wall street protests, I am most definitely not interested in new a new HD TV, vacation cruise or a way to accept recurring bills. Come on people, have some common sense. I would like to know which brand managing, new age, social advertising “guru expert” advises these companies.
I think you get the point on my feelings towards display advertising. There are definitely ways to get paid honorably and still produce good if not great content. Just look over at DaringFireball’s by John Gruber. It is just one example of a simple, unobtrusive and relevant marriage between content and advertising. I would like to see more such websites and therefore at my own blog here I strive for the same balance.
It makes me happy to see more advertising networks such as The Deck andInfluAds spring up. Just last week a new comer in the arena piqued my interest –The Syndicate. Why can’t most websites be like the ones using these networks. Yes, yes I know profit.
Well I just hope my article gave you some food for thought. If you have any influence over a website try to make it better, try to make it less of a bother to the reader and I know in the long run you will be more successful.
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