Printed Matters

Because I believe that advertising is the business model for news sites, it perhaps behooves me to throw some ideas into the ring.

People say online display ads don’t work, for any one of a few reasons: banner blindness, ad blockers, inventory glut, and low CTR chief among them.

Yep, standard banner ads suffer these problems. But with a little imagination, maybe some of these problems can be overcome. Here’s five ideas for online display advertising.

1. Serve different ads to logged-in site members than to one-hit wonders. Seems like a no-brainer, but I don’t know of any news sites that do it. This would overcome the objection that we don’t know the audience, or that the audience is not engaged. Wait, what are they signing up for? To use the interactive features of your site: to comment, upload a pic, do a blog post, whatever it is. (I’ve said I’m against paywalls but walls in front of stuff that either can’t or shouldn’t be spidered – i.e. don’t affect site SEO – are fine by me.)
2. Put ads right in the places where logged-in users are doing stuff. You know you have an active, engaged user when they are right in the middle of posting something. Show them an ad before they can get to the form. Better yet: show them an ad after they submit the form, and tell them they have to click somewhere before their form will be submitted. After having worked to fill out that form, you can bet they’ll want to see it through.
3. Make ads part of a CAPTCHA process. This would be useful especially where you don’t want to make people sign in just to leave a comment. And they’d really have to study the ad! You’d ask a question like “What is the product being offered in the advertisement to the right?” or “Write the name that appears on the dog’s food bowl.” Easily implemented. You’ll have to serve your own ads though, not network ads. Horrors!
4. Display interstitials on second story view. Not exactly a new idea, but I don’t know why this isn’t done more. Let them come from Google, so you can set a cookie, but then if they try to view another page, hit them with an interstitial. Only hit them once per session. Users can get around this by disabling cookies. Let them. Most won’t for the minimal hassle they have to endure. This one is good for the fly-bys who might actually look at more pages. Some do, you know. You’ll have to give them good stuff to click on while they are on that story page, though: related stories for greater depth, a gallery of photos to go with the story, etc.
5. Lay ads on top of the pics and videos that they’ll actually want to see. You can have display ads that get in their face and yet are not obnoxious. I made a quick-and-dirty example for this idea. There are five pics ostensibly go with the story (well, they’re all of my kid, except the one of the goose.) But to get to them, you have to move the ad out of the way. By the way: the ads displayed in this fashion could be 100% contextual.

Obviously, none of this will work if you haven’t done the basics, such as good SEO and provision of community-building tools like comments and forums and galleries. They also cannot work if nobody sells them, i.e. if you don’t have a dedicated, well-trained staff of salespeople.

Note: it appears there is a two-year-old patent application for the CAPTCHA-as-ads idea. Harumph.