I suspect that online advertising may continue to flourish. Why? Because you can measure the return on your ad campaigns, and with proper monitoring can quickly terminate ads and campaigns that aren't performing. I expect "pay per click" and "pay for performance" ads to continue to perform both for businesses and for publishers who use them properly.
I hope for my own sake that you're right about McCain and Kristol so that you can be wrong about this one; I can't stand popup ads. One of the newer innovations seems to be the popup blocker blocker; i.e. Javascript coded into the site such that if it detects you're using an ad blocker, it will switch places between the ad and the content you wanted, so that instead of seeing only the content you wanted, you get to see only the ad, sometimes with a notice telling you to turn off any add-ons you might be using. Failing that it will just display nothing.
ReplyDeletePersonally, if ads ever become unavoidable again, I'd rather just pay a few bucks here and there and avoid the ads.
I'm not describing the manner in which an ad is presented - but the type of ad and the manner in which you pay for the ad.
ReplyDeleteI personally hate pop-ups and interstitials (an ad displayed when you click from one page to another, where you either have to wait or click a link to go to your desired destination page), but I understand that they generally perform poorly. That issue is one of how the ad's displayed, though, not how it's paid for - and I'm talking about the system of payment and the tracking of performance. You can track online ads with significant granularity, while conventional advertising relies on broad demographic information and is much more difficult to assess in terms of performance.
Pay-per-click ads require the advertiser to pay only when somebody clicks on the ad, so with a well-crafted campaign you can usually be pretty sure that your customer is interested in your product if they click the ad to come to your site. Pay-per-performance ads go a step further, and require (for example) that the customer make a purchase, fill a form, or complete some other specified action before the publisher (the site displaying the ad) is paid.