It appears that we humans are quite adaptable. In a relatively short time, nearly all of us have learned to ignore ads on the Internet. The best way to prove this is through eye tracking studies that capture exactly what we are looking at on a Web page.
A great visual representation of this is through the use of heat maps that show the greatest concentrations of attention as red, lesser attention as yellow, and, finally, no color markings for areas of the Website that failed to capture any attention.
For example, the image below shows the results of an eye tracking study done on three disparate Websites, with the results displayed as a heat map overlay of the site. The ad spaces are clearly marked by the yellow boxes. As you can see, all of the readers' attention is on the content section of the Website -- the areas marked in red and yellow.
To make matters worse for advertisers, browser plug-ins that block 99 percent of all advertising from ever reaching the intended audience are growing in popularity. For example, Adblock Plus is a one-click plug-in for your browser that was recently downloaded 363,934 times in one week. That is roughly 19 million downloads a year, which is equivalent to 27 percent of all U.S. households with Internet connections. It is also likely that the type of users who install ad blockers skew towards the more educated and higher income brackets that advertisers covet.
So, if consumers are ad blind and using ad blockers more and more, how will advertisers respond? Reducing online advertising spending is not a likely outcome. The advertisers know they need to be online and are moving greater shares of their advertising budgets online every year to reflect the fact that the Internet is now the No. 1 media channel at work and the No. 2 media channel at home. (See P&G Canada’s recent announcement that it will increase online advertising from 3 percent to 20 percent of its total budget.)
The most likely response is a shift in advertising spending away from the ad networks and to branded content placed on the content real estate of targeted sites. Advertisers are increasing their budgets to create rich media and branded content. They need to find a way to engage customers with this content on chosen partner sites.
This will require a new technical mechanism that overcomes the limitations of micro sites. Hopefully, everyone will be better off as brands move away from ads and towards meaningful content, such as linking back to their Website via posted videos, podcasts, blogs, and other rich media supplements, in order to engage their customers.
if Facebook is offering you season tickets to the Yankee games because it sees that you're in the New York network and that you have baseball as an interest, wouldn't you be interested in those type of ads?
I don't think it would require a totally separate degree and major. I just it would require some emphasis on user-centered design and some studies of what does work for Internet advertising. It's all about adaptability.
To some, targeted advertising is seen as convenient. To others, it's seen as the result of spying. I know that if I go to Amazon.com, that they have a listing of my purchase history and can make 'recommendations' about other things I might be interested in. This can get really annoying if I buy an item for one of my parents that's totally outside of my area of interest. Now Amazon thinks I need more recommendations for that type of stuff. Oh, joy!
Now for a different scenario: If I'm out randomly surfing, or using a social networking site, and start to receive advertising based on the sites I've visited or interests I've listed, that would quickly invoke the creepiness factor. There's no way I'd be clicking to follow that link...
Multitasking abilities, not age, I submit differentiates those hep to the new jive from traditionalists who use land lines and actually shake hands and have face-to-face meetings as their primary means of communication...
One of the things I have noticed over the past year as Yahoo seems more and more desperate is the increasingly annoying and animated sameness of the flash-based and flash-like video ads that are directly in front of you at the level of your right eye. Not only does it appear they were so desperate as to give GE a huge never ending plug that danced and annoyed and distracted, they bled over into the left lane content stream on the page... with the irritaing need to chase down the close icon.
To me there is a lesson here that may go to google's gains and yahoo's loss of market share in the search engine space.
Google gets that many users suffer from the Yuppie Flu of the 90's... they are easily driven to distraction... yes, many IT people have it: ADD - Attention Deficit Disorder.
ADD is a twin edged sword in the emerging Internet Age.... it enables people to multitask, hyperfocal focus, and pull all-nighters but at the same time it causes them to need to because they are so easily distracted (by the myriad distractions on the search page among other things).
On the other end of the spectrum are those with immense concentration and little tolerence for Crap and Comm Chatter.
Both categories of search engine users naturally gravitate to an uncluttered search engine interface for productivity's sake or to avoid the incessant, annoying, busy sameness of the Yahoo splash page mileau.
Google get's that it seems. Yahoo does not.
Now, Google's adsense is a stroke of genious IMHO because it offloads the blather onto the affiliate webpages a gazillion deep on the Internet. This permits Google to maintain a pristine splash page in contrast to Yahoo.
It's the difference between a search engine that generates ad revenue and an ad platform that also has a search capability.
But even when Yahoo does succeed in hooking you (for hours on end or intermittently over the course of a day) they don't get timely rotation. It's the same news blurb for much too long a time interval. Even when they have your login for yahoo mail, they do not take advantage of it and vary the presented content (or ads) based on your personalized interests as they could.
If it were not for the fact that google GETS the harmony between a search engine and a more subtle blending of ads, as well as distribution of the payload via adsense, I think someone would have come up with an ad-free version much like cable TV subscription services were in the early days (until we were all addicted).
There is going to be an inevitable embedding of ad content... but the numbers should have rung a bell long ago in Yahoo's head.....
When it comes to being a search engine with advertising, Yahoo never got what Google seems to: Everything in moderation and in accordance with the Golden Mean.
I have, might be, a little bit weird question. What do you think, could the person that majoring in usual media advertising -like printed or TV advertising ,could be successful in Internet advertising? Or one needs completely or mostly different education and major?
It’s definitely a tug of war where ad-blockers will
continue to defend one’s view from invasive advertisements while advertisements
will continue to evolve in becoming more creative in delivering their sales
pitch.
In general I don't like advertisement, on the TV on radio and even more so on the internet. Why so? Because most of them are poorly presented. Thanks to internet technology, we the users now have the ability to block all the annoying adds as we brows the internet.. Are all ads poor in presentation? No, but most of them are, example: the way Yahoo present ads on their home page, is so distracting that I avoid visiting yahoo as much as I can.
If only the advertising industries would clean up their act, and rethink their approach and methods, they might just hit the right chored with the audience they are trying to reach. Internet technology presents them with lots of options, which if they could just endeavor to take the time and critically think through the "Who" the message is intended for, The "How" the recipient of the message would like it presented, and the "What" will the recipient do with it, then and only then might they gain an audience from the demographic they have been trying to reach all this time.
Till the internet advertisers really care and understand how and when to present their message in a meaningful, creative and appealing way, there would always be need and use for Ad-blockers. And the ad-blockers for now seems to be wining.
But the internet brings new opportunities for marketers. Users have all their information running around the internet, if marketers are able - and are allowed! - to gather that information and use it to generate an ad specially made for that user they will hit the jackpot.
Because I believe that we are not against ads, we are against useless ads. If someone came to me talking to me about SLR cameras or something relevant to my life I would at least hear what they're saying.
If we talk about Facebook, if they make a partnership with Amazon and together they create an algorithm that sees that in my interests I have photography, telecommunications, traveling, and some other things. They could manage to generate an ad that offers me discounts in any of those. And then use my friends to say: he just bought this, maybe you don't want to stay behind. But it's all based on information and the proper use they give to it.
As Jakob Nielsen said, people don't pay much attention to ads on websites if it is presented like "Ads". What really matters is contents and users want to put their eyes away from anything that looks like ads. According to a study on Banner Blindness conducted in 1997 and reconfirmed in 2007, "users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad." And the ony way to make people focus on ads areas is to present it "unethically" by violating the principle of separating "editorial contents from paid ads contents. So, some designers make the ads look like contents by making them appear in a specific page session. But with the many ad-blocking utilities that are now available for the users, it is obvious that online advertisings will no more be effective and many companies will have to bid for less online ads.
While I understand that some online services need online advertising to stay alive, I don't necessarily want to see them.
In fact, right now,there's a big blank area at the top of this page where I assume an ad is supposed to be... why is it blank? It's because I block all online ads. And I do mean *ALL*. I haven't counted them but I block over 50,000 known ad sites. Why do I block ads? For one, it slows down my browsing. I use the internet as a tool... And like a carpenter uses his hammer, if everytime he used his hammer he had to remove 10-15 advertisements to get to his hammer, he'ld soon give up his hammer!
Online ads are usually dispensed by a 3rd party who has questionable security and questionable motives in collecting the data it collects for a fee for the websites it serves. I don't know if the ads I'm getting are sanitized from black hat hackers or if the ad server its self is run by black hat hackers! These ad servers also use the ads for tracking purposes which I certainly do not agree with.
And blocking online ads goes with my own personal rule: I do not accept unsolicited offers for goods and services. By following this rule, it keeps me out of any potential trouble!
So, how do I block over 50,000 ad servers and known evil places on the web? Well, I use a multitiered solution that involves freeware software and a little tweak involving the hosts file.Every machine I setup (and there have been hundreds) I setup with the following pieces of software:
Adaware-obvious
Avast Anti virus protection
ZoneAlarm firewall
NetCraft anti-phishing toolbar
and the tweak...
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
Go here and download the text file. Put the contents of the text file in to your hosts file (usually located at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc), save it (if you're running zonealarm, you may have to turn off hosts file protection) and there you have it!
What did you just do? Well, you took over 50,000 known ad sites and malware sites and redirected their web address to 127.0.0.1. This is a special IP that is called the loopback address...
It works for every machine... If you ping 127.0.0.1, it's like you are pinging your own local network card on your computer!
By redirecting these sites to your loopback address, you will be greeted by either a blank spot where the ad was, or a 404 error, or in some cases where the ad server captures your web traffic and then redirects to the site you were trying to go to, you will just get a big 404 page... And let me tell you... if this happens, then I don't want to visit that site anyway!
If the site doesn't have the common courtesy to allow people to come to their site without going through an ad server, then they dont' deserve my traffic!
So, I see no ads in ebay, no ads in my yahoo mail, no ads on google, and no ads on this site as well! My browsing is ad free and page loads are speedy and not cluttered with all that stupid, crazy blinking, flashing ,moving epilepsy inducing ads!
I recommend that everybody reading this page at least go to http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm and stop reading ads today!
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