I clicked on a web ad today! June 12, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , trackback
It's probably been over two years, but I actually clicked on one today. Because Gmail thinks I'm a spammer, I've been getting tons of delivery failure messages. Gmail served up an ad for help (for a price) for getting email accounts off spamming blacklists. Geez, talk about a perfect revenue scheme for Google. Practically shut down a user's account and then serve an ad for a vendor to help you fix it. Righteous business model. Not evil?
Despite Google's AdSense victory over me today, it has been a very, very long time since I clicked on an ad. Honestly, when was the last time you clicked on AdSense or a banner ad with the intention of possibly buying something? Seems to me that today's web ads (read adwords/adsense) could be built on a house of cards. I worked at Ask Jeeves when the banner ad business collapsed. It wasn't pretty — and it wasn't until Google devised contextual ads (with a large enough base of ads to allow specific targeting) that online ads became (a very good) business again. However, revenue for online ads is declining again, signaling the need for a disruptive ad model to spur new and robust growth.
The next generation of ad products will not only need to be contextual and targeted, but will need to be interactive. I need more than relevant hyper-linked text to get me motivated to look further. I need marketers to understand the social media I use and communicate with me the way I do. Use Twitter, FriendFeed, MessageDance, and even TiVo. Have my friends opt-in to show me what they liked. Engage in a conversation with me, if I choose. I know this is controversial and not fully-baked, but main-stream web users are quickly becoming desensitized to the current way of delivering ads.
Google believes it is their "moral" duty to help fix online ads; it's also 98% of their revenue. Hurry up because Web 2.0 is counting on you!
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