Printed Matters

A couple of recent articles in EditorsWebLog have me thinking about advertising again. Newspaper execs are having a tough time figuring out how to monetize their websites, while advertisers are concerned about how to measure audience on websites.

And I think interstitials deserve another look.

Interstitials are ads that take up the full screen as you move from one page to another on a website. Here’s the Wikipedia entry. And here’s a better explanation, complete with an example.

I think we all know the problems with standard banner advertising, those flashing, blinking rectangles of annoyance that occupy the margins and header areas of webpages. People have trained themselves not to look at them. There’s evidence that people don’t even see them. Sufficiently irritated people can get programs or browser plug-ins or mini-scripts to block them entirely. Click-through rates, about the only measurement we have to determine whether people are seeing the ads, are dismally low and at any rate can be gamed.

Pop-ups/unders/overs have similar problems and are even more annoying. Modern browsers come stock ready to block these.

Yet, a content provider has to make money from the content it provides somehow. And when it comes right down to it, there are really only two ways to make money from content: the consumer pays to get content (e.g. subscriptions, box sales, pay-per-view) or the content is supported by advertisers (e.g. sponsorships, banner ads, flyers, etc).

I think, and the consensus today among publishers is, that advertising is the way to go on the web. Pay walls go against the spirit of the web and reduce its utility. Besides, big media outlets like the New York Times have found that the money they can make from advertising far outweighs the money they can make from charging for their content, prompting them to take down their pay walls. The traffic that comes into their archives from search engines like Google is massive, and also, nobody’s going to pay for content (news, in this case) that they can get elsewhere for free.

But if advertising is the way to go, and traditional web advertising performs poorly, where does that leave content providers?

I’d like to make a case for interstitials. Cookie-based, server-side interstitials. Why? They can’t be skipped unless the user turns off cookies. You can limit how often a user gets hit with an interstitial – say, every 10 minutes, as the user moves from page to page, he gets hit with an interstitial. He’s forced to look at it for, say, 10 seconds, before he’s allowed to move on to the content he wanted to get to.

If the user dumps his cookies, then he just gets hit faster…he moves to one page and then when he tries to move to the next page: an ad. Some users may turn off cookies. In that case, you can also turn off certain premium content, like videos. Those are expensive to make, and don’t do anything for Google traffic anyway, so if cookies are off (like a search engine spider) then the browser doesn’t get to see video. They also can’t log on, for example, so depending on how you have comments set up, they won’t be able to comment or participate on the site. I’m sure there are other ways that users could be gently punished for turning cookies off.

But why would the user do that? Surely the user can stand looking at an ad for 10 seconds every 10 minutes? There’s a much bigger ratio of ads to content on TV and yet people have watched TV under that regime for many years.

The advantage to this scheme is that you know for sure users are seeing the ads. At first, they may use their 10 seconds looking frantically for some way to skip the ad or avoid the horrible punishment of looking at the ad. After a while, they’d get used to it, and see it as an acceptable compromise, I think. Somehow the content has to get paid for, and this it is really not much to ask a user to contribute less than two per cent of his time to the cause. Acceptance levels would be higher, of course, if media companies got together and standardized the details.

The numbers can be adjusted, of course. Maybe the ratio should be one per cent or five per cent. Maybe five seconds is enough time to see the ad, and maybe it should be served every five minutes. Testing will sort all that out.

You can get ad-blockers that work by domain name, so that stuff from doubleclick (for example) can be filtered out. In that case, the user would be left staring at a blank screen. So maybe ads should be served from your own domain name. If you belong to a network, maybe they have to push the ads to your server somehow.

Note that the “one-hit wonders”, people who come in from Google to read your stuff and then are off again, don’t get hit with an ad. You know what? That’s OK. They probably don’t care about your message anyway.

I’d really like to hear some feedback and comments on this one.

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