Dear Titans of The Online Advertising Landscape,
Oh goody, it’s my turn to share an opinion! (Just for you, Ryan Brown)
Soup is correct that advertisers seem to have an adversarial relationship with their target audience when it comes to online media. The big problem here is that you would prefer advertisers to entirely pay for your content so that you don’t have to pay for it yourself. Would you like a gross analogy? Of course you do. Reading advertiser-sponsored content on the web, and making no effort individually or collectively to accept any responsibility for the financial viablility of the people providing you service or entertainment, is the equivalent of accepting one of those Craigslist ads where someone offers a room share in an phenomenally nice apartment, requiring ZERO rent, on the condition that the existing owner/tenant be allowed to sleep in your bed with you, and occassionally put a pinky finger up your ass.
Spiers is correct that web advertising is not as physically intrusive as people make it seem, and it’s better than it used to be. She is correct that those ads exist because they are the most efficient at what they are supposed to do - which is to use media to induce psychological triggers that make you more inclined to purchase their product. (this is invasive, but it’s what seems to work. More on that later.) She is correct that if you are scared away by a stupid pushdown, the site is probably not worth reading anyway. She does not address the real reason why we don’t appreciate advertising - because it is clumsy and often has little or no use to us. I did not want to specifically pick on car ads and pretend that everybody can take a subway to work like I do, but… I just hit up 5 of my most frequently viewed advertiser-supported sites, and all but one of the ads were for cars or car insurance. We all know that all middle-class people do not or should not buy cars so frequently. (One ad was for a specialty vodka… I think if you beat the snot out of Seth Godin and he ended up in a coma and woke up with no memory and severe brain damage, his first words would be, “Another specialty vodka? One of the top rules of marketing is that is a dumb idea to think you can make money off of a small portion of a large oversaturated market.” And then he’d pass out again.) This is even more true now in the middle of a recession - most ads are obviously for retail products, and many of us are not doing any non-essential spending.
Advertising is part of the problem with the American economy, but not because they’ve figured out how to put it everywhere. Advertising is terribly inefficent. (Most people don’t dislike advertising because it’s there; they dislike it because it’s so often obnoxious and awful.) Retailers figure that increased spread and stronger tricks will make up for that. Instead it just makes it more inefficient, mostly. They can never tell what works and what doesn’t in terms of an overall marketing plan, because successful businesses are trying every trick in the book, so who knows what works? Not just for marginal improvement, but actual ROI. Do Sunday newspaper catalog inserts work? Does bus stop advertising work? Do website pushdowns work? Does putting your logo on a urinal cake work? If someone goes out and makes a big jackass public scene camcorder video involving your brand, posts it to YouTube, and makes it viral, does THAT work? (Note: I’ve always thought Best Buy should be cutting checks to Charlie Todd. Just saying.) And does any of this work in a slow economy vs. a credit bubble? Can you move product if you aren’t offering 0% down for 18 months to a fucking meth addict?
If your profit model is moving advertising-supported editorial product, re-read that last paragraph and tell me why you’re not FUCKED. Or why you don’t have to let the advertisers stick their hands up your ass and make you move like a puppet if you want to stay in business.
Now…
I’m not saying this works, but: if you can get 1,000 subscribers at $1 a month, your gross income is $1,000. Does it matter what you’re doing? Nope. Just 1k subscribers (S), $1/mo (F), $1k gross. Play with one number and it moves the others. 2k subscribers, $3/mo, $6k gross. 4k subscribers, $1/mo, $4k gross. If you can figure out how much you need to make per month (N), factor in expenses (E) and you can solve the equation (S*F)-E = N, well then you have SOLVED THE GREAT ONLINE EDITORIAL PUZZLE. Actually, the idea is to get the left side of that equation to the highest number possible, and make more than you need. I don’t know if enough people on Earth will pay their own subscriber fees to boost up S to a non-depressing number. But I don’t feel so great about relying on advertisers to pay F, either.
Joe, Michael, Ryan, James, Elizabeth, Tim et al.
Please help us luddites. Us lowly consumers of your “free” online content. We don’t claim to know anything about your business, we simply are making observations as the very people you are aiming to market to.
Why, I ask is there such an adversarial relationship between many content providers and their consumers? Is there bitterness because it is so difficult to make a living in this business and the consumers should simply shut up because they’re “getting it for free?”
Wouldn’t it make sense to develop advertising methodologies that consumers actually appreciate? There was a time when pop-up and banner ads were thought by advertisers to be an effective method to reach customers, but we evolved. Is it that difficult to imagine that the reason it’s so hard to make money is because the models currently being used simply don’t work.
Are we supposed to believe Pushdowns and XXL Boxes are going to get consumers excited about the products your advertisers are paying you to promote? I suppose if you can keep getting advertisers to pony up, it doesn’t matter how obtrusive the ads are, but if the content isn’t compelling enough to make up for it, you’re going to have less pageviews to justify anyone paying for them in the first place.
But what do I know, I’m just one of your customers.
I don’t think any of the sites you regularly visit are really going overboard with intrusive spots. Certainly none of my sites. I also don’t think pushdowns/XXLs/etc are nearly as bad as the older intrusive methods (pop ups, splash pages, etc). I think they’re an improvement.
At any rate, the inflection point is the point at which you decline to read because of the ads. And what sites have you stopped reading because the Pushdowns and XXLs were soooooo annoying?
I would also bet that there are sites with spots that are much more intrusive than the ones mentioned above and you read them anyway. Why? Because you want the content. And if the price of a pushdown is too much for you to pay for that content, well that’s an editorial problem.
Also, you have to understand those spots are popular for a reason. They test better with users for both ad recall and user interaction. You may not personally like them, but on the whole they get better results. If you were clicking on those boring, less intrusive 728x90 leaderboards occasionally, there would be no need for Pushdowns and XXLs.
But you’re aren’t.
