Advertising on the internet has not been a windfall for anyone
Original article date: May 2002
Advertising is a proven strategy for generating sales.But advertising has to be appropriate. An ad for ice cream in an engineering magazine would be wholly inappropriate, and nothing more than a distraction. It sounds obvious, but it’s something the online community has been putting up with for a long time.
I saw something very interesting recently. It was a letter sent to me by the organiser of a huge set of online communities, and the following is an extract. “Advertising on the internet has not been a windfall for anyone. You know it, and we know it. More importantly you have proven it by ignoring almost all our advertising efforts.”
“Internet advertising is interruptive and distracting yet, for an internet communication and content company, it has been the traditional means of generating revenue, regardless of how inappropriate or counterintuitive it is. If you walked into the grocery store, in a hurry to purchase milk, bread, and eggs, and a stock boy grabbed you by the arm and kept distracting you from your list, instead trying to sell you fertiliser, you’d be furious. You would eventually quit coming to the store, ignore the help, or whack the stock boy.
“Advertising on a community site like ours shares some of the same distracting elements as the example above. Our site is like your grocery store.”
Needless to say, the organiser went on to explain that it was time to either pay for its excellent service or lose it. I must say, I felt like calling the CEO to congratulate him on his straight talking good sense. More to the point, I realised that this excellent service was about to get better because the one down side, the inappropriate advertising, was about to disappear for good.
I really do hope this bold but sensible new strategy succeeds, because now that the novelty has worn off, many of us would like to see the net mature into the sort of market where someone can come up with a good idea, charge for it, and make money. Why? Because they’ll be good quality, reliable and profitable services that are still there tomorrow when you need them.
So now’s the time to tell the internet business world what you want. They might finally be able to provide it! Write in with what you want from a website or online service – not what you think would make someone else a good business (and not your own private, secret money making dream) but something that you as a purely selfish user wished you has access too. Do you, for example, wish you could convert from any file format to any other at a pay per file website? Or perhaps you wish you could check a customer’s late payment reputation online? These are the ideas whose time has finally come. Why? Because we all have limited time and will pay a small amount to have someone make things easier for us. Life is simply too short to do things the long way.
Finally, a rant. I hate these “pop under” and “pop over” and “pop behind” adverts on the internet. But they are still happening, despite the fact the people who use them invoke the hatred of the community. And if they’re still happening, that means they must be working. Yes, some pillock out there keeps responding to these moronic advertising tactics, thus dooming the rest of us to a desktop full of rubbish. Whoever you are, stop it. Think what you are doing to the rest of us and pack it in. You’re probably the sort of person who reads the infuriating loose rubbish that flows through the door. Don’t you ever learn? You probably even buy things from the pondlife who call us all up at 8pm and pretend to be on first name terms in order to try and sell financial services.
Have a thought for someone else for a change.
May 2002