The Omnifarium - Computing Devices

On Internet Advertising

Category: Computing Devices
Thu, 13 Mar 2008, 12:49

Like many other webmasters, I too want to find ways to generate income from my web site. The Google AdSense program is a great way to bring in a few dollars, but it would be nice to take in a bigger piece of the advertising pie by selling ads directly.

But selling ads is not easy. Many advertisers don't want anything to do with the traditional banner ad since they are seen as ineffective. But from the point of view of the webmaster and of the visitor to the web site, banners remain the best solution. Let's have a quick look at some of the other methods advertisers use:

Some advertisers count on techniques that basically annoy the reader. Pop-up ads, and their cousins the pop-under ads, foist the advertiser's message directly in your face. In the few seconds before the reader hits the close button, the advertiser hopes that his message will get through. For me, pop-ups and pop-unders are so much a nuisance that if I stumble upon a web site that uses them, I back out immediately and never return.

More recently, advertisers have turned to another insidious technique, that of buying pages on web sites. A visitor to the site may read some content on a site and believe it to be the opinions of the webmaster. But in reality, the content, including it's external links, is paid for by an advertiser. Since this content is paid for, the objectivity of the material is obviously suspect. But because the content is on an independent web site, the reader may not be aware of the true nature of the content.

Have you seen ads in newspapers that look like articles? Respectable newsrags will put a disclaimer at the top indicating that the article is really a paid ad. But for most publications, their biggest customers are the advertisers. And for many, it's not easy filling a weekly or monthly publication with meaningful content, and so many will accept content from their advertisers. Sadly, the same is happening with some web sites.

This causes a problem for the search engines, like Google. They try to determine the quality of information on the zillions of web sites out there. One way is to count the number of links to particular web sites on the theory that the better quality sites will have more links pointing to them. Links that aren't paid for are considered more useful since there are no ulterior motives in adding such links to a site. But how do you differentiate between a paid-for and a non-paid-for link?

It's been reported that Google has some algorithms that try to determine the quality of links. Apparently, if Google determines that a web site is playing games to try to improve its page rank, Google may place the site in a sort of "penalty box", and exclude the site from search results. And so advertisers end up playing a cat and mouse game with Google, trying out different ways to pay for links that will not be found out by Google!

As always, the person caught in the middle is the average web surfer. The average person visits web sites looking for information or entertainment. Sometimes, he goes on-line looking to buy some particular product or service. But generally, the average person doesn't want to have to wade through lots of ads. Plus, the average person wants to be sure that the information he reads is objective and untainted by commercial interests.

The increase in the number of paid-for pages, as well as "text link ads", is yet another annoying development in the story of internet advertising. Web surfers need to be even more vigilant than ever in carefully reading web site content. Can we expect webmasters to always identify paid-for content? Probably not. Whenever we visit web sites from now on, we need to constantly ask ourselves if what we are reading sounds objective, or sounds more like ad copy.

Omnifariously yours, Hans.

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