Dale's Weblog » looking back it was easy

Advertisements == spam?

Posted by dale on Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:00:27 EST

It looks like RSS feeds are set to have ads now too according to this article (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65347,00.html).

What I really want to know is how much money do advertisements really make, and how many people click on an ad? You really need a high traffic website to make ads profitable but even then, if you’re running a high traffic/volume site you should have the income to easily support it.

I don’t know. It just seems a bit odd. Like spam in a way, really isn’t all that effective. I know I don’t click on ads. Maybe that is because I don’t buy stuff online.

I can see that google adsense might be more effective. It displays ads depending on what text is on the web site. So if I had something like “I just killed my grass by using the wrong kind of fertilizer” you may see an ad for “super extreme fertilizer for your grass, with NO ill effects”. Funky. But still you need to be in the mood to want to buy something.

Ads are effective (to an extent) when they’re in a new medium, for example RSS. People aren’t used to them so they are more likely to read them. But when you start getting ads in the same volume as spam you just ignore them.

Does anyone here find ads useful?

Below are the comments for this news item

Eyetrack studies have found that text ads are far more effective than graphical ads. I'd agree… it takes more effort to block text-ad servers! Muwahahaha. Nah, seriously. Ads can be effective, and I'd strongly disagree with

if you’re running a high traffic/volume site you should have the income to easily support it.

I presume places like C|Net news (news.com) et al like it must make their money SOMEHOW. Subscription services are starting to take off, I guess, but I've got no idea exactly what the revenue breakdown is.

P.S. When this box starts to scroll, your pretty graphic gets crushed :P Guess that'll teach me to be long winded…

1: Comment by Josh - Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:17:02 EST

Gah. You and your lack of HTML markup support in comments! Meh, you know what I meant.

2: Comment by Josh - Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:17:36 EST

tehehe I can edit stuff now ;)

3: Comment by dale - Tue, 19 Oct 2004 18:19:11 EST

BBCode:

urls become clickable

[b]place text in bold[/b]

[i]place text in italics[/i]

[quote]place text in a quote[/quote]