Are Plain-Text Ads Doomed? 275
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."
Why shouldn't they work? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't need to see a picture of a memory module to be interested in an add offering to sell me 512MB RAM at a good price.
Remember, content is king.
Where advertising should really go (Score:4, Interesting)
Spymac (Score:4, Interesting)
had a pretty innovative ad for a week there. It showed something to the extent of :"No Ad here for a week, brought to you from MSN of Os X" and then dissapeared after 3-4 seconds, leaving you without flashing lights or anyway, which made the surfing quite enjoyable.
If you missed what the ad said you could hover on it and it gave you a hands-on on what MSN is and blah blah... I have to admit that was a slick ad!
Next generation ads (IMHO) (Score:5, Interesting)
Ads will start getting integrated right into what you are doing (especially games). This isn't, necessarily, a bad thing. It'll help keep the consumer costs down for the product, and aren't as annoying and attention-stealing as popups or banners.
Would this be considered a text ad? I'd say so, unless you want to classify it into a new class, like 'integrated ad.'
Re:Next generation ads (IMHO) (Score:3, Interesting)
Gator [gator.com] does things similar ot this. It "watches" what you do, and presents competitor coupons and such. Aside from the fact it's annoying as all hell, it's decent adware software. They get really high click through rates, and it actually is a cool idea. When you look at a book at Amazon, it'll tell you, "IF you go to Barnes & Noble and buy this, we'll give you 5% off"
Annoys Amazon, but it sure as hell works. It's like the legal mafia of advertising.
Why text ads really do work ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Doomed is Such a Harsh Word... (Score:3, Interesting)
Text ads have been show to work and continue to work (although, possibly to a lesser degree after the "novelty" wears off). It's a matter of finding the niche WHERE they work effectively.
Text ads on Google? Love 'em!
Often I use Google to conduct searches for products and services I want to buy. They key word there is WANT. Often, the text ads are more useful to me than the Google search results because (surprise, surprise) they are from companies that WANT to sell that product. What a perfect match! I just go down the list (of ads, not search results) and choose a vendor that has what I want and offers terms I find acceptable.
I give further props to those guys that are clever enough to put an ad in front of me, at the time I want to buy, about a product I want to buy and do it in THE LEAST ANNOYING MANNER POSSIBLE.
I figure they deserve my business for the fact that they are not advertsing in an annoying manner. I will gladly support a smart and non-annoying advertisier with my hard-earned money!
My web-proxy doesn't block text ads (Score:3, Interesting)
It is the lack of individualization that seems to come with the more annoying ads that I dislike the most. I do not need another web-cam, no matter how many times they pop up that ad, but I am interested in the ad for a company that sells micro-ITX motherboards.
So I only get the text ads.
Re:My Experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Paradoxically, the better the data on a site is organized the less likely a user is to want to break out of the information flow they are in. But decreasing the quality of information only has the effect of making it less valuable to visit that site in the first place.
Arguably, to be effective advertising should be located near where the user makes information flow decisions, and the information flow decisions cannot be so consistent that the user learns to ignore any alternatives that are presented. For a Blog style site like your nancies page, that would mean interspersing advertising into the news stream as articles. You don't want to confuse readers, so the advertising should be in offset type and layout (mp3.com does a good job of this), but the position of advertising within the news list should be altered from day to day.
While we are on the subject though, I should probably mention a pet peeve that I have with online advertising. Just because you can change which advert is delivered with each page doesn't mean that you should. Varying the content from user to user is fine, but having seen the page with a specific layout once, the advertising should be left the same the next time that I view that page. Swapping out ads messes up my information flow; I have to backtrack to see if I missed something that I really wanted to read, and I may have lost a link to an ad that I really wanted to follow later in my browsing.
Re:Not convinced... (Score:3, Interesting)
So many banner ads rely on a sequence of frames to get their messages across, like poor man's TV, but I have animated gifs turned off in my browser so I never see the whole story.
Quite often the first frame is often a plain box, so it obscures itself without me having to do too much server blocking.
I'm all for the support of sites that I read. Bandwidth, hosting and upkeep aren't free, especially on big sites. There's only so much I'll subject myself to to that end though. Slashdot's animated gif adverts weren't all that bad if I remember correctly, but it's not worth the trouble to turn animations on just when I come here.
I have clicked on Google's text ads before, when searching for prices on a laptop hard drive for my iBook.
Marketing is all about getting people to remember your product by any means necessary, then it will be in their mind when they need something in the future - or at least it used to be. The current method of being as obnoxious as possible has some degree of backfire.
I know I'll never buy windows from Safestyle UK, even though I can tell you all about their offers. Anyone who shouts constantly for 45 seconds trying to sell you windows on the radio will be recognised, but never get any business.
Re:Nielsen and reality (Score:2, Interesting)
Because of the simple layout, using your own stylesheet (and thus your own favorite colors) works rather good.
However I see, some problems also, there are better websites, yes, but not the majority. This funny link gives useit.com a C score (75%) on its own criteria! (Nielsen said about this, that he found that rather good, compared to the budget).
Usabilty analysis of useit.com. [cwnet.com]
Jakob Nielsen is an idiot. (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, for gods sakes this is was the 'usability expert' behind CDE! the ugliest, impossibleist to use window manager ever!
I guess anyone can make themselves an expert putting out some press releases and sounding condescending.
But it may be more insidious than that (Score:3, Interesting)
We may very well see increased efforts at "target marketing, or profiling [ecommercetimes.com]
We may also see attempts to incorporate subliminal messaging in the product placement, or product intrusion in our online experiences. Such messages could be placed to prove difficult to directly link to the advertising.
Since, as far as I can tell, subliminal messages are not in themselves illegal, this can be used in advertising. They were banned [straightdope.com] by the American networks and by the National Association of Broadcasters in June of 1958.
Finally, whether or not submlibinal messages work is still in controversy [go.com]
Relevance (Score:3, Interesting)
I just now noticed that
But, when I go to google looking for something, I pay just as much attention to the "ads" as I do the "results".
Since ads are targeted by keywords, there's a good chance that the ads have exactly what I'm looking for.
These ads have relevance.
Ads will be effective when the customer is ready to accept them. Ads will universally be ignored when they are just irrelevant noise.