Who would’ve guessed fifteen years ago that little boxes shamelessly touting diet pills, debt consolidation and laser hair removal would come to generate more revenue than the GDP of many countries?
Google is still king in online advertising but in the last few years many companies have jumped on board to clutter web pages and try to trick us into giving them our attention.
These include major vendors such as Yahoo, MSN and Adbrite, contextual linking from companies like Infolinks and affiliate programs including Ebay and Amazon.
No Shortage of Options
Many webmasters must not be able to make up their minds because they choose to display just about every single option available to them and make their banners more prominent than anything else on their pages. Advertising is so powerful that it has changed the very purpose and motive of the majority of the sources of information we find online.
This delicate relationship between content and ads is being debated fiercely on many top blogs and online forums.
It’s not just the number of companies that makes today’s online advertising overwhelming, as many radical new models are being introduced, some solely for the purpose of driving web surfers mad, it seems.
There are floating ads that follow you around the page no matter how hard you try to shake them, expanding ads that become enormous and obscure the rest of the site until you can find the minuscule “close” button and the dreaded interstitial ad that takes you to a full-page ad before you can go to the page you actually wanted to see.
The ads even follow users away from their computer in the form of text message ads sent to their phones.
With all of these frustrations, could it possibly be any worse? Well, according to the below video from The Onion, yes!
(you’ll have to pardon the short video ad you have to watch beforehand…I promise it’s worth the 15 seconds!)
New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears
With any luck it won’t come to this, but what do you think will happen with online advertising in the next few years?
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on August 18th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
What will happen is it will only get worse. I read blogs every day, and I have to say that a high majority of bloggers are blogging for Google and not their readers.
There is nothing worse to me than landing on a blog post and being greeted by a popup or slide-in or a fade-in that takes up the entire center of the page. The second worse offense that a blogger can inflict on me is an adsense ad pushed up against the text of the blog post itself. For Gawd’s sake people, learn how to use div tags and hspace and vspace when placing your ads. Either way, you loose me as a reader simply because your desire to make a few pennies on a click was more important than giving me the information I came looking for.
Of the $20 billion that G takse in for advertising, who do you think is the biggest sucker in the blog game – them or the mere pittance they pay out to the minions doing their bidding?
Nice post on your part …
on August 18th, 2010 at 11:35 pm
the most frustrating thing with ads is not being able to find the close button. sometimes you have music playing in the background too and you don’t know where it is coming from.
on August 20th, 2010 at 4:06 pm
@bkpkgene,
Thanks. I completely agree with you. It’s so frustrating to see so many new bloggers asking questions solely about SEO and Adsense keywords and absolutely nothing about how to write compelling content.
My least favorite thing to see is when someone thinks it’s a great idea to put an adsense banner over their main content in a free blogger blog. It ends up completely ruining the theme because it usually just floats in the middle of nowhere. It’s not what the developer had in mind at all.
@parker,
Sometimes they make it so hard! There must be some reason behind big websites always auto-play a video when a page loads, but I don’t like it.
on August 20th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
I think there’s a good chance that if advertising becomes such a problem there is some government intervention or restriction on what ads can do/where they can be/size of the close button. I think it’s also possible that there’s a big user backlash against it.
But, I think the most likely outcome is that people become so accustomed to internet ads and just to be noticed they have to become more obnoxious to the point where ads are no longer a super-viable source of revenue for most small-scale websites.
on August 30th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Case in point – I refused to watch your video because captive advertising drives me insaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane!
on September 20th, 2010 at 9:50 am
I second (or third) bkpkgene. I am actually trying to find some DECENT blogs to put in my bookmarks so that I can also leave my comments and 99.9% of what I see is useless garbage. My god it’s frustrating. And of course, where they lack talent or content, they surely make up by placing tens of ads 😀