OK, I understand that websites need to make money, especially big ol’ corporate ones. I mean, even I have a sponsor box on my home page and associations with a handful of affiliates. But the reason one visits a site is for its content. They come to get some information, read a good article, look at some pretty pictures, get their porn fix — whatever. Blinking ads at the top of the page or interspersed within the text have become as acceptable as the commercial break during Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We all accept that as the price we pay for “free” content.
But, if those banners don’t get clicked, the site doesn’t make money. Everything is measured in clickthroughs. TV commercials are based entirely upon viewership — advertisers pay a premium for the higher rated shows, like the Super Bowl. It’s virtually impossible to get immediate and accurate feedback from TV commercials. The web allows for a modicum of measurement, and that’s been taken to its extreme. If a site doesn’t get the clickthroughs, it’s deemed a bad advertising venue. And, because the advertisers have the money, they can determine the methods of payment.
I get no money up front for advertising Match.com or Amazon, no matter how hard I push them. That doesn’t mean someone visiting my site won’t be affected by my advertising. A visitor may see my little blurb that I met Dani through Match.com, but not click the link. Then, one night when they’re lost in a drunken stupor driven by loneliness and depression, they may remember that blurb and TYPE IN THE ADDRESS TO MATCH.COM IN THEIR BROWSER rather than come back to my site and click on the link. So, even if I did win that sale, I get no credit.
Ultimately, this doesn’t bother me. I do the same thing all the time. It’s just the nature of the game. But, because of the mentality of the clickthrough, websites are now far more lenient about letting advertising run roughshod all over their content. And here we get to this episode of Things that Piss Me OffTM.
I’ve been reading Salon for several years now. They went public not too long ago in what was a spectacularly poor IPO. While other companies were opening at $15 a share and closing the same day at $135, Salon gained a paltry five or so points. And, when you took a look at their financials, it was easy to see why. Publishing anything daily is a huge cost. most newspapers are usually less than a week away from folding, yet continue to run by some strange miracle of the press. This is why the New York Times and Wall Street Journal — two of the most respected newspapers in the nation — recently broke tradition and began to use color. Good content costs good money. USA Today is a slapped together coloring book with no soul, but it makes money by keeping overhead low and using mostly wire stories for its big news.
What Salon didn’t realize is that the Internet, while cutting the obnoxiously huge daily printing costs of a paper periodical, didn’t slash overhead enough to still run like a standard newspaper. Periodicals rely almost entirely on advertising for revenue. Subscriptions are a small part of the overall revenue and primarily exist to establish a firm readership to whom ad space is sold. But web advertisers have the clickthrough mentality. No matter how many daily visitors Salon gets, nothing matter more than the number of them that actually click through on the ad banners.
Usability studies have long held that ad banners are no longer an effective means of advertising. Web surfers have learned how to either scroll down to get the banner out of sight, or simply ignore their existence. So sites and their advertisers have had to come up with more intrusive means of getting their message out in ways that the surfer can’t ignore. They started by using pop-ups, then by using pop-unders. But those are windows that surfers have learned how to close in a single click. Thus, the evolution of the ad gets worse.
I know you’ve seen these ads. They’re usually Flash animations with transparent backgrounds. One recent one was for the Saturn Vue. It featured an SUV zooming around your screen, eventually parking on a banner ad at the top of the screen. I actually thought that was kind of neat, until I began seeing it EVERYWHERE. But that’s relatively innocuous compared to ING’s travesties.
Visiting Salon one day, I clicked on what looked like an interesting link. The link took me to a mediary page that contained only an ad, rendered in Flash. While annoying, these are the web equivalent of the TV commercial spot, so I’ve learned to accept them and just click on the link that says “Take me directly to story.” Once at the story, I begin to read the first graph. The, out of the blue, a gigantic paint brush rolls across the article, painting everything in its wake an obnoxious Tang orange, obscuring the very text I’m trying to read. The orange streak then become a stage for an ad for ING, a new financial services company. I look frantically for a “skip this” link or button — ANYTHING — so I can get back to my story. Then I find it. A tiny little “X” in a box at the top of the orange streak, barely noticeable. Click it and the ad is gone, but by then I’ve already lost interest in the story and I leave Salon for the day in a huff.
I’m picking on Salon because they seem to be the ones who do this most often, but it could really be any content or news site nowadays. I’m seeing ads like this pop up with more frequency. Unlike browser popups, you can’t just click on the page to bring it to the fore and banish the popup to the back of the window stack. And, in many cases, the close box — if you can find it — doesn’t appear until several seconds into the ad. That’s all it takes for a site visitor to say, “Screw you guys, I’m going home.”
In journalism, we’re taught that readers are fickle. If you don’t grab them in the first paragraph, pulling them further into the story, you’ve lost them. If you don’t continue pulling for at least three paragraphs, they’ll never get to your conclusion. This is especially true in feature articles, rather than news where the most salient info appears right up front. Given this, why in God’s name would ANYONE let ANYTHING get in the way of pulling the reader into the story.
I can only think of one thing: The advertisers are now more important than the story.
Such a sad reversal. News reporters fought for years to build their reputations by fighting the business end of the paper, who would prefer to see favorable stories about their advertisers rather than exposes. If the sales department of the New York Times had their way, they would probably have asked their reporters to find a way to spin the Worldcom and Enron failures in order to get their ad revenue and keep them as loyal customers. While that would do a disservice to the readership of the paper, it may have made more sense to the bottom line*.
It’s pretty clear to me, though, that the sales department is what drives the design of our favorite content sites. No self-respecting newspaper would let their ad sales team lay out the paper. They’d put a fat Macy’s add on top of the masthead on the front page and charge a serious premium for it. This is, essentially, what these Saturn and ING ads are. Even though they typically appear on the content pages themselves, they are often on the pages that are listed as the top headlines on the site’s homepage. They scream the message, “Forget about this story, check out this cool new car!” And the ads are, admittedly, flashy enough that the visitor may click on them to see more of that flash. And, since the web surfer is far more fickle than the newspaper reader (there’s no $0.25 investment involved and competing content is literally a click away), the real possibility exists that they will never come back to the story they started reading. And that’s a disservice to both reader the writer.
Bottom line, folks: if you run a site whose focus is on content, nothing in the world should be allowed to get in the way of that. No matter how flashy the ad, or how much the advertiser paid, there is no excuse for allowing these folks to run roughshod over your content. It sends out the message that you couldn’t care less about your content, which begs the question as to why you’re in the business to begin with. Of course, until web advertisers quit the cult of the clickthrough and begin paying websites fairly in the same way they pay TV stations and newspapers, this kind of thing will continue. If you think the web is saturated with ads now, you haven’t seen anything yet.
* The flip side to that argument is that reporting the Worldcom disaster accurately and completely may sell more papers, thus increasing the circulation numbers that are oh so important to other advertisers. The Worldcom example may be a bit extreme, but this kind of thing happens all the time between the sales and news departments of papers across the country. Back to rant
