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It's Not Ad Standards That Have Killed The Online Ad Business
from the it's-crappy,-annoying-ads dept
We've been pointing out for some time that any business that relies on traditional display advertising to make money is in for a world of hurt because almost no one pays attention to those ads. There's a simple reason for this: they're not at all relevant or useful. They're often annoying. And, most importantly, they're not what anyone is on a page to see. When people surf to a web page, they're looking for the useful content -- and most advertising is not useful content.
This seems rather obvious, but it hasn't stopped some folks who tend to rely on such bad display advertising from trying to rationalize why that market is rapidly shrinking. The NY Times quotes MSNBC.com's president, Charles Tillinghast, who says the real reason that display advertising is drying up is because the IAB agreed to standard sizes for display advertisements earlier this decade. To him, that meant that the display ads were distributed everywhere via ad networks, creating over-supply and commoditization, driving down prices.
While I don't deny that there may be an oversupply -- I doubt that a more limited supply would have made a big difference. The problem isn't with the supply. It's with the demand. Most people don't want such useless advertising, so they ignore it (sometimes with help from Adblock). If you want to make advertising work, the issue isn't getting rid of standardization, or worrying about commoditization, it's about making the advertisements into good content that people actually want to participate with, rather than annoying "ads" that they want to avoid.
