5 ms·

Ask YC: Ads and The Internet

3 points by iamdave 18y ago

I just sat through a 30 second flash animation advertisement on salon.com before I was even prompted the option to skip the ad before it looped back to the beginning. Internet advertising has and will probably forever remain the bane of user experience. But in some degree, ads have always had an escape plan. Be it clicking the close button, finding another site with the same content but doesn't force ads on you, or just clicking the "Skip this ad" button. Lately, escape vectors are becoming harder to find and content providers, in the sake of "keeping content free" have begun to sell out and cheapen the user experience by providing no means to escape advertisements. Personally, I think this is bad behavior chiefly because it encourages bad tactics that will probably only get worse. That prompts me to ask this: while we respect the objective of advertisements on the internet, do you think forcing advertisements on sites is a bad strategy? What are your thoughts on giving users no escape vectors to see the content they came to see?

nostrademons 18y ago
One of PG's "Ideas we'd like to fund" was "Fix advertising". The idea being that advertisements shouldn't be something odious that you sit through; they should draw you in and be relevant to your own desires. I gave some thought to it last month but couldn't come up with any ideas on where to begin. It's tricky: you're acting as middlemen between three parties (advertisers, site owners, and users) whose interests are usually (but not always) opposed, plus the chicken-and-egg problem of attracting advertisers before you've got sites and sites before you've got advertisers. If my job hunt goes poorly I wouldn't mind spending some more time on this problem. It's so obviously broken: companies aren't making many sales off Internet advertising, websites aren't making much money off advertisers, and users hate what the other two groups are doing. For now I'm just trying to clean my open-source plate.
thwarted 18y ago
Interesting ads, at least on the internet, have such low return because the ratio of time/effort/money put into them vs how much they make is so low. If the return, in absolute terms, is the same as for an ad that no time/effort/money was put into (largely just mentioning the brand name, which is what a lot of ads are) is going to be a higher ratio and thus what people end up generating. It's purely economics. Even video ads, on television, that could be considered to have "gone viral" may get a lot of face time in front of consumers because they are interesting, but they don't necessarily increase actual sales. And a lot of these more interesting ads may not focus enough on the brand--how many times have you seen an ad on television and thought "what exactly are they trying to sell me here?" or "is this really the message they want to send about this product?"--and you may remember the ad but forget what it's about. Making ads "interesting" isn't some silver bullet that is going to increase sales, but it most likely is some silver bullet that will get more eyeballs looking at your ads. When was the last time you saw a car ad that didn't have a bunch of meaningless data points (some defensible but largely irrelevant mention of "handling", damn even MPG is used like a throwaway data point in car ads) or show the car driving through some city scape or mountain pass? They _all_ show exactly the same thing. I'd like to see more ads like the early radio ads (does Paul Harvey still these?) where something is specifically endorsed by a personality (rather than just being a paid familiar voice) and the ads are less fluff and catchphrases and more listing benefits and competitive comparisons. This would be hard to do because a lot of ads are purposely misleading or downright lies because they are advertising commodities or consumer items that actually have no benefits or are not differentiable. Truly informative ads might not be entertaining, but they would definitely be more useful than, oh, say having the "Tap The Rockies" Coors Light song in my head because I mentioned "Silver Bullet" up there. And I _don't_even_drink_or_intend_to_drink_ Coors Light (so that's a wasted ad on the part of the advertiser).
- qhoxie 18y ago
  Good points, but that is hardly a wasted ad. They got in your head enough for you to mention it here as an example, potentially compelling a reader here to go buy some Coors.
  - thwarted 18y ago
    Guh. When you can't effectively measure the effectiveness of each ad dollar or you don't have a meaningful or differentiating product, I guess you take what you can get. Even "I don't like X" is advertising for X. I think this says more about the advertisers and the products than the ads or the consumers though.

3 points by iamdave 18y ago

nostrademons 18y ago

One of PG's "Ideas we'd like to fund" was "Fix advertising". The idea being that advertisements shouldn't be something odious that you sit through; they should draw you in and be relevant to your own desires. I gave some thought to it last month but couldn't come up with any ideas on where to begin. It's tricky: you're acting as middlemen between three parties (advertisers, site owners, and users) whose interests are usually (but not always) opposed, plus the chicken-and-egg problem of attracting advertisers before you've got sites and sites before you've got advertisers. If my job hunt goes poorly I wouldn't mind spending some more time on this problem. It's so obviously broken: companies aren't making many sales off Internet advertising, websites aren't making much money off advertisers, and users hate what the other two groups are doing. For now I'm just trying to clean my open-source plate.

thwarted 18y ago

Interesting ads, at least on the internet, have such low return because the ratio of time/effort/money put into them vs how much they make is so low. If the return, in absolute terms, is the same as for an ad that no time/effort/money was put into (largely just mentioning the brand name, which is what a lot of ads are) is going to be a higher ratio and thus what people end up generating. It's purely economics. Even video ads, on television, that could be considered to have "gone viral" may get a lot of face time in front of consumers because they are interesting, but they don't necessarily increase actual sales. And a lot of these more interesting ads may not focus enough on the brand--how many times have you seen an ad on television and thought "what exactly are they trying to sell me here?" or "is this really the message they want to send about this product?"--and you may remember the ad but forget what it's about. Making ads "interesting" isn't some silver bullet that is going to increase sales, but it most likely is some silver bullet that will get more eyeballs looking at your ads. When was the last time you saw a car ad that didn't have a bunch of meaningless data points (some defensible but largely irrelevant mention of "handling", damn even MPG is used like a throwaway data point in car ads) or show the car driving through some city scape or mountain pass? They _all_ show exactly the same thing. I'd like to see more ads like the early radio ads (does Paul Harvey still these?) where something is specifically endorsed by a personality (rather than just being a paid familiar voice) and the ads are less fluff and catchphrases and more listing benefits and competitive comparisons. This would be hard to do because a lot of ads are purposely misleading or downright lies because they are advertising commodities or consumer items that actually have no benefits or are not differentiable. Truly informative ads might not be entertaining, but they would definitely be more useful than, oh, say having the "Tap The Rockies" Coors Light song in my head because I mentioned "Silver Bullet" up there. And I _don't_even_drink_or_intend_to_drink_ Coors Light (so that's a wasted ad on the part of the advertiser).

qhoxie 18y ago
Good points, but that is hardly a wasted ad. They got in your head enough for you to mention it here as an example, potentially compelling a reader here to go buy some Coors.
- thwarted 18y ago
  Guh. When you can't effectively measure the effectiveness of each ad dollar or you don't have a meaningful or differentiating product, I guess you take what you can get. Even "I don't like X" is advertising for X. I think this says more about the advertisers and the products than the ads or the consumers though.