Here is a lesson for you: don’t cover great content with monster banner ads.

Christopher S. Penn points to this problem in his post “How much did that ad just cost you?”, something a lot of users deal with every day. No wonder I often read “banner advertising is dead …or it should be”.

As an online publisher, why would you write something great and then hide it with a big pop-up? You should know that users scan the page first, trying to find something interesting, and just then start to read. If the first thing they see are banners, your visitors will soon lose interest for the site and leave. So this is a lose-lose-lose situation:

- you, as a publisher, haven’t succeeded in retaining your readers’ interest

- the advertisers didn’t get their banners clicked (perhaps readers need time, trust and interest to click, which is not the case here)

- readers haven’t quenched their thirst for knowledge and information

So we can conclude that websites with a moderated amount of advertising on them have much more to offer to users and advertisers alike.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 1:37 am and is filed under News & Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.