Why Traditional Advertising Formats Fail On The Web
by Scott Karp
As media companies struggle to figure out their digital future, the elephant in the room is that they have only been able to monetize online audiences for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional media. Here’s why: Traditional advertising formats FAIL on the web. By traditional advertising formats, I mean display ads, video ads, and any other ad whose format and value proposition approximates or imitates that of an offline advertising format.
Google is the ONLY company that has succeeded in web advertising. Why? Because they perfected search advertising, an entirely web-native form of advertising, whose value proposition is perfect for the web and which has no offline analogue.
Why do traditional advertising formats fail on the web? Because people have no patience for them, as they did in traditional media, where we were habituated to looking at print ads or watching TV commercials.
Research by Jakob Nielsen puts this into sharp relief:
Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.
This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.
“Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so,” said Dr Nielsen.
“People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.
This is why pre-roll ads on online video = fail, why overlay ads on online video = fail, and why online display advertising is a commodity business, where online publishers have to shovel page views and battle for every $1 increase in CPM. Some sites can get $50-100 CPMs on some pages from certain advertisers, but $1 — even $0.10 — CPMs are common on the web.
Excellent article continues at publishing2.com