Are Plain-Text Ads Doomed?

friedegg writes "Usability expert Jakob Nielsen's latest alertbox examines the future of text advertising on the web. Text based advertising has become increasingly popular recently partly because of Google's success with it. Nielsen notes that advertising works well on search engines because users visit them with the specific intent of going elsewhere. He also thinks it's only a matter of time before the novelty of text advertising wears off, and users develop "box blindness" in addition to their current "banner blindness." It isn't totally negative, though, as he thinks the low-end media format forces advertises to express a focused and succinct message that users may take more seriously."

text ads advantage

[cetan]

Text Ads have one other advantage over banners: You can't filter them out with software. (At least not now, or rather, not that I've seen.)

Blocking banners and pop-ups is pretty trivial, but blocking text ads? That seems to be a more difficult problem to solve.

From the article: Google Text Ads NOT doomed

[anagama]

Neilson makes the point that text ads in search engines are not doomed. He notes:

Text-only ads on search engines have become particularly successful in recent years, and non-search sites are now experimenting with this format in hope of replicating that success. However, it's doubtful that their efforts will work because non-search sites lack the equation's crucial element: users' single-minded goal to leave the site as quickly as possible.

He also points out that the ads resemble content to an extent when they are related to a search. It is text ads on any random homepage that are doomed according to Neilson because those ads are not targeted.

This seems awfully sensible - I'm sure most people have used Google's text ads at one point or another because they offered a solution to a particular search. My guess is that most people make a point of avoiding ads on non-search websites, whether text or flashy. I certainly do.

I responded to a text ad a few hours ago

[MickLinux]

I've been thinking about a project that requires a mySQL server, perl/php, and https. Of course, I don't have those skills to do what I want: that is the kind of thing you can buy, though.

So anyhow, I remembered a text ad from Kuro5hin, from half a year ago. So I went over *to* kuro5hin, found the ad, clicked through, got an email address, and sent a specific question.

I don't know whether I'll buy from them: I give about a 5-10% chance of buying at all, even if the price is right. However, I can definitely say that text ads do work. Yeah, I'm blind to them, when I need to get stuff done. But for that same reason, I appreciate the consideration that is involved in a text ad, so when I have free time, I really do read them and remember them.

it's not very hard

[Trepidity]

If they have a consistent placement/formatting on the page, they're easy to filter out with a regexp based filter.