Online advertising is facing as many struggles as advertising in newspapers. With so many ways to target Internet users it’s a wonder how such companies aren’t generating record revenues. But alas, with the economic recession, there are few companies that are generating any substantial profits when compared to previous years.
The New York Times bits blog says that one method certain companies have been employing is to change the size and appearance of ads on websites so that some could be floating in a given space and grab the reader’s eye, while others would just be larger. They state that MSNBC has already begun to use this model. When viewing the MSNBC site, it is apparent that when viewing certain pages, one is bombarded with a video ad that pops up onto the screen, but is specifically only contained within that page. Upon clicking the back button or a link to another page the ad disappears with it.
The company that supplied the ad, Vibrant, promotes its “in-text” ads on its site. It lets the viewer roll over a specific word to see what the ad would look like when it pops up, kind of like the blogroll section of someone’s blog on this site.
Yahoo in-text-ad from Google
Another method that has grown in popularity particularly on Hulu‘s video site is the 30 second or one-minute video ad that comes up before the site lets you watch the show you clicked on. When watching a re-run of house the other day, I was brought to a page that gave me the option of viewing the show uninterrupted if I watched a one-minute Chanel ad instead of 30 second ads dispersed between every 10 minutes of the show. This new option may begin to prove more effective for advertisers on other popular sites, depending upon what those sites offer. Since Hulu is a video service, it makes sense that people shouldn’t mind viewing one longer snippet of a video ad since they were already set on watching their program and they are used to seeing such ads on regular television. It will be a matter of time before a new standard for Internet advertising is set.
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